Verstehen

The self emerges in response to others. Very early in life, individuals are able to interact with their selves such that there is the “inner” and “outer” self.

When I ask myself, “Who am I?”, in a sense the outer me is asking the inner me a question. When the inner me responds to the outer me, the answer is absorbed by the total me. This affects self dialogue in the future.

A small letter from John the Apostle includes the command “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Typically, this verse is understood to refer to the testing of spirits beyond the self. These spirits are not from the true God but from demons, the devil, false and pseudo gods that deceive.

Yet, when we test the spirits, we should test to see if the voice is only one’s self speaking only to itself.

When I read a sacred text and look toward a transcendent message, how do I distinguish between a voice from beyond myself (a “spirit”) and a voice from within myself (outer and inner me).

When I recall an incident from the past week — is this a spirit bringing something to mind? Or is the outer me addressing the inner me?

When I pray and listen, who is speaking? My spirit (the outer me) or THE spirit (beyond me). How can I tell?

The Apostle Paul more than once gave the warning, “Do not deceive yourselves.” Perhaps in attributing thoughts to God, we deceive ourselves because the voice we hear is coming from within us.

Recently reading through the history of higher education in America, I learned about significant shifts in curriculum design through the 19th and 20th centuries. The earlier in the history of college education you go in America, the more homogenous the ideal of intelligent citizens. Courses were a set series emphasizing language, biblical studies, and moral philosophy. The later the history of college education, the more diversified the course offerings, allowing individuals to create a highly personalized curriculum suited to their own dreams and aspirations. (Most colleges today combine the two — a series of classes that are “general” which contribute to exploring a common set of orientations and understandings about the world to be followed by “major” courses or concentrations that specify the particular interests of students and their preparation for work beyond the academy.)

Colleges and university administrators concluded that general education alone fails to prepare individuals who, for the greater part of their lives, will puruse particular kinds of work and professions. They were right. Increasingly we see specialization as necessary to distinguish oneself in the marketplace and weed out competition. Perhaps some college graduates with family connections or a prestigious degree will find positions regardless of their major (or move into professional-training in graduate school as doctors, lawyers, or some brand of MBA) and without their degrees pidgeon-holing their future. But for the greater populace, specialization is demanded for economic survival. Religion majors struggle to find jobs accounting majors take for granted. And job applicants rarely succeed in convincing employers to hire them. “Hey, I can do the job, just give me a chance.”

Changes in the structure of undergraduate education greatly differed with the changing standards of how to accomplish the cultivation of civilized, intelligent citizens. Ultimately, specilized courses and greater freedom in the selection of them is an adaptation to the demands of a society with greater division of labor and a faster pace of social change.

General versus specialized education got me thinking about churches. In my understanding the church ultimately produces people, and the cultivation of people (in worship, in community) is their primary role.

Yet, the church largely pursues its role by treating people as being all the same. Large crowds hearing single speakers on broad topics is the ecclesiastic equivalent to the standardized curriculum for mid-19th century colleges. Multi-site churches using the same speaker on several screens accentuate this. Attenders are treated as being multiple copies of the same “Human Being” with the same needs and desires, with the same hopes and aspirations, and with the same challenges and opportunities.

I think far more time among church leaders is spent folding people into general frames of thought than in finding ways to uniquely individualize the spiritual growth of their people.
The assumption of attender homogeneity adds to the difficulty of attaining relevance to the lives of everyday people. More general messages fail to account for the particularities of people’s situations. The variety of paths taken by people outside of the church (in work, family, education, interests, hobbies, networks, relationships) are completely ignored. Attenders are increasingly left up to themselves to “apply” what is being taught. Spiritual lessons run like sand through the fingers of attenders as the grasp for truths and guidance leaves little if anything left for each person’s life situation.

The questions I have today —

Is it possible to envision the cultivation of humanity that adapts to the increasinlgy peculiar circumstances individual people find themselves in today?

Do we have to accept that individuals are ultimately “all the same”?

Are we forced to cultivate a shared, homogenous humanity in the local church?

Should we force homogeneity while the community is gathered, hoping the unity remains long after the final closing prayer?

Or can the church imagine a means to broaden and diversify the types of spirituality that could become evident among the dispersed body of Christ?

Howard Thurman insists that a person that encounters “God” enounters with the totality of their person (The Creative Encounter). I like reading Thurman. However, in reading him today I have new questions. Today, I question the notion of totality.

A person does not encounter any aspect of their life in “totality” as the whole of a person’s life is not equally engaged or equally present in any moment. I doubt “totality” is ever possible.

Surely totality is greater than the physical presence of a person. And it cannot be merely the “spiritual” side of a person since the physical body fully impacts the human spirit (however defined). If the human spirit is psychologically based, all psychological understandings of a person emphasize the hidden, unknown, or unfathomed aspects of the human psyche such that while these can and do affect the person, they are not fully present at any time. The human psyche is not static but morphs and develops in response to interactions in the world (see Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents for a classic exposition).

More importantly, the “totality” of a person is dependent on the social environment in which they participate (Emmanuel Levinas develops this philosophically; Alfred Schutz develops this sociologically). Individuals become different in different settings, calling forth different aspects of the self, stimulating constructions and re-constructions of the self out of available resources (Erving Goffman is great here). Props, rituals, and, especially, particular audiences with particular expectations are inherent to the continual enactments of ourselves.

I believe Thurman is motivated by a deep desire to affirm the dignity of individual human beings. Drawing on forms of mysticism, Thurman wishes to release the human spirit, believing truth is birthed from within human beings rather than imposed on them from without.

Yet, The life of persons involves response to reactions to a person; for example, some environments invoke racial superiority/inferiority of people while others do not. Thurman in other writings rightly shows how the injustice of racial attributions and discriminatory actions and attitudes impact human beings. The totality of a person in these aspects of Thurman’s writings is forced unavoidably to respond to historically arbritrary understandings of persons. This aspect of the self becomes part of the “totality” of the self only situationally. Some might say a person’s race is part of their totality, but critical research in this area overwhelmingly reveals that race is selectively invoked and with great variability across history and geography.

Totality, then, may be a heuristic concept in an attempt to come to terms with whole persons. Yet, totality is much too individualistic, tends to ignore social structure, and attempts to streamline the complexities of the human self. It easily becomes misguided in leaning toward an essentialist interpretation of persons.

Because God is defined within orthodoxy as being “all-seeing” and “all-knowing,” Thurman and others with a theological stance believe human beings approach and are approached by God in their totality. Like Adam in the garden, we are naked and vulnerable before God. With Thurman and others, it is assumed that individuals bring with them accumulated experiences into their person. Like sticky fly-paper, human beings accumulate and integrate everything about them; Adam appears along with his sin and shame. Human totality is an ever-growing balloon of inner/outer thoughts and occurences resulting in the person one is in their ever-present existence.

There is something about this understanding of totality before God that is both frightening and attractive. I don’t want God to see everything about me. I want God to reveal things about me. I don’t want to be condemned for who I am in my totality. I want to be accepted in my totality.

Even before God, the encounter (Thurman’s Creative Encounter) illicits new aspects of the self. It leaves certain things behind, making them irrelevant, and generates new aspects of self. On the Damascus Road, Saul becomes Paul; a new self emerges. Did God encounter the totality of Saul? Is Paul the new totality? Is the notion of totality only meaningful in relation to an omnipresent, omniscient God?

If totality cannot adequately represent human-to-human relations and only God-to-human relations, the notion has severely limited utility. And such notions developed paradigmatically in God-to-human relations (for example, Martin Buber’s brilliant book I and Thou) will keep us from adequately understanding the more contextually-dependent, multiply-invoked self of everyday life.

The pursuit of interpretive understanding is radically humanistic. Plants and animals do not construct meanings in the same way human beings do. This is not to disparage the love of living nature or concern for animals but rather to assert that by coscientiously looking to the meaning-filled behavior of human beings, we cannot reduce humans to mere objects manipulated either by the force of external nature or by the internal force of psychic dynamics.

While meanings are not determinitive of human behavior (whatever I can think, I can do), they affect behavior in fundamental ways (what I think I can do, I will often try to do).

Meaning therefore structures human behavior. It can channel or constrain behavior in unexpected ways. Meaning bears fruit in unanticipated forms. The reconstruction of meaning-filled behavior embedded within contemporary, unquestionned social activity leads to surprising discoveries of the power of meaning in giving birth to human society.

Here begins an attempt to pursue understanding of the world away from percentages and statistics, taking into acount common orientations to everyday life, systematically investigating social meaning in the ongoing reproduction of the social world.