On Being Right

This article is actually the conclusion to my upcoming book. In the conclusion, we tackle how to know you’re right, how we come to say we know anything, and why do we focus on the truth anyhow! If you like what you see, watch out in the coming months for the release! You can find the Introduction, selections, and many more articles on my Substack: https://rememberingtomorrow.substack.com Tune in every Thursday for my Thirsty Thursday Series, as well as articles appearing every Saturday morning!

I have found that closing a book is the hardest part of the whole process. As the time comes to begin putting words to paper, I am veritably plagued with fears, worries, and doubts. Have I accurately and sufficiently made my case? Is it worth making this particular case in the first place? Have I missed anything crucial? Have I accurately represented the thought of those I have relied upon? And, possibly most damning of all, am I right?

This last question is the final point of discussion I would like to focus on. I close this book with this examination not so much that my own fears might be alleviated, but so that any who read this book might not enter into the newly rediscovered world of debate with a fatally erroneous stance towards their own articulations. This book is, after all, an anthropological, epistemological, and philosophical starting point from which conversations surrounding freedom, personhood, individuality, and the framework of reality itself can evolve.

The premise of any argument is of such profound weight that if it is faulty, the logical conclusions which follow are often just as wrong as they are rationally sound. To return to G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, we might observe that, “the madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable.” So if my readers are not convinced of the truth of my argument, you may be tempted to suppose that all you have done is wasted your time in reading something which will not equip you for further discussions. I must show at least some mark of having spoken the truth, and not merely spewing rationales from my own insurmountable subjective experience.

Perhaps even more fundamental than defending my own stance, however, this conclusion ought to provide a sort of recap of the whole overarching argument. A cathartic close to the conversation preceding, as it were. And luckily for me, tackling the radical subjectivity of the human experience and relating it to both the objective truth and other persons around us has been forefront to our conversation. In fact, as far as logical progression goes, a formal treating on Man’s communal nature and a practical application of the personalistic norm and what Man’s state as a gendered creature seems to be the next step. Alas! There is only so much room in this current project to tackle such things. Stay tuned for a continuation of the conversation!

The thesis of this book can really be summed up in one sentence: Man is, at his core, an essentially communal - not isolated - animal, and can only encounter reality or come to knowledge as relational to and encountering another subject - THE Subject, God, specifically. The modern world would have every individual left to their own interpretations of data which occurs only to them, and has no metric by which we can be sure we are right. Open-mindedness, for those trapped in the absurdities of the enlightenment, is then nothing but doubt of perceived truth as potentially - but unverifiably - simply the product of my own psyche. “At any street corner,” Chesterton astutely observes, “we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Everyday one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.” Without reference to God as Creator and preserver even of our subjective senses, this modern view is the only coherent conclusion - in spite of its absurdity.

The evidence for the truth of this first statement, that Man is communal and comes to know only in relation to another subject is manifest through our discussion. Man desires to know, he can only know through his senses, and his senses are aimed at one thing: allowing him to choose the good and live according to truth so that his life might be beautiful. This is God, Who creates and preserves our subjectivity through our senses and speaks to us particularly through them. If we were not relational beings, if we did not find fulfillment in an encounter with another subject outside of our own autonomy, we would not seek other. We would attempt to choose our own good, and would rightly regard God’s intervention as an unjust imposition on our individuality. This conclusion, within the framework of teleology, is simply untenable.

Teleology plays an important role in our conversation, and indeed in detecting coherency in the cosmos. In this light, there is a second follow up-sentence which I suppose sums up the ramification of the articulated thesis: we can know something is rational (and therefore aimed at truth) not inasmuch as it is logically consistent in its internal argument but rather when it is aimed at beholding the order of the cosmos - and when it is the function of a subject understanding the cosmos. Reason, in isolation, is maddening and further isolated the individual. Again, leaning on Chesterton, “we may say in summary that [the chief mark and element of insanity is] reason used without root, reason in a void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.”

There is no subjectivity in the madman Chesterton describes. He is not someone who perceives the world and acts upon it with his own aims, seeking to understand the cosmos and live according to the true and the good. The madman is an autonomous robot-like calculator, whose every action is dictated by some other data along the string of occurrences that has led to this moment. Rather than determine the truth through dialectic and live as a response to that truth, the madman is an victim to the data of his own logic. Reason must be aimed at understanding, and understanding is aimed at beholding God as Person. In other words, Ratio must have Intellectus as its aim.

Does this book bear the marks of being correct? I would posit yes. However, the truth of the preceding pages will be up to the reader to discuss, weigh, and determine. While I have intended and attempted to represent the truth to the best of my ability, carefully weaving thinkers like Pieper, JPII, Ratzinger, Pinkaers, and McIntyre together to form a tapestry reflecting reality, truth often becomes manifest through discussion. That is the whole point of relying on other authors’ works in the first place: entering into discussion with those giants who have already come before.

In a discussion, two or more subjects aim at the same truth through discourse with each other, thereby elevating their reason beyond the calculations of madmen and machines and into the realm of the human, aimed at the divine. Discussion is the epitome of rational activity, for it is in discussion that reason has a proximate experience with its oriented goal: beholding of another subject and His revelation of Himself. To this end, I hope the reader sees fit to discuss these pages with others so that their merit might become apparent. In any event, I have tried to cultivate even within these pages an atmosphere of discursive tone.

Discussion is precisely what is lacking in the world today, and why so many absurdist claims are gaining traction among thinkers and doers alike. When each individual becomes isolated in their own data collection/interpretation, there is no encounter with another, and reason becomes mere categorization of perception. These categorizations are as invincible to outside refutation as they are isolating for the individual. The response to this phenomenon, Chesterton suggests, isn’t so much to refute the individual as much as it is to merely extract him from his own insanity - to allow him to encounter another subject. He writes:

“If we attempt to trace [error of insanity/pure reason] in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that [the mind so plaqued] moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large… The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
Encounter, not conquering, is the aim of reason. If we, as a society, can reclaim this, many of the absurdities in our intellectual spheres will dissipate. Not only that: many of the societal ills will fade away into distant memory, too. Suicide, euthanasia, rampant addictions to alcohol, drugs, and pornography, all these become solvable problems when we forsake the notion of individual categorization, the theory that I can determine what I am allowed to do, and am licensed to do what I can get away with if only I do no harm to another person. When we stop becoming individuals in our own subjective worlds, we can encounter and live together out in the real world, the world which encompasses the whole of reality.

Let us be Men; let us cease to be crows.