I've been reading/thinking a lot recently about identity (as you have undoubtedly noticed in previous posts). I'm surrounded daily by students who seem to be feverishly consuming, rearranging, adding to their lives in an attempt to feel good about who they are. I had multiple conversations this week with students who are "too stressed out" and who want to drop some responsibility, requirement, activity because overall they're too tired and miserable to enjoy anything. The argument, across the board, is that there is one activity (a sport, a class, a club) that puts them over the edge, that they used to enjoy but that no longer brings them happiness, and that dropping that sport/activity will allow them to be happy again.
This is so sad! If they continue to approach their lives in this way - evaluating the worth of their activities based on what those activities do for them - they will never find happiness. It's so subjective, so transient, so unstable. In my frustration with a particular senior, I asked her what part of the activity of grading papers, lesson planning, and prepping soccer practices she thought gave me happiness... what does spending hours correcting paragraphs on ancient Egyptians do to enrich my life? Although I was perhaps a little harsh in my presentation, my point was that meaning in life cannot come from what we do... we must realize that meaning comes from something much bigger, something outside of ourselves - that what we do is a product of that ultimate meaning, or a vehicle for bringing that meaning to others, not an end in itself.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis addresses this tendency in modern society to base value judgments on either what is rational (the head, cerebral, what can be arrived at by deconstructing to the point of eliminating all things emotional) or what is instinct (the stomach, based only on what makes us feel good, rather than on a standard outside of ourselves). He says,
"The head rules the belly through the chest - the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment - these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal."
And his point is that the chest, Magnanimity, must be based on a standard of what is good that is completely independent of either our rational, deconstructive analysis or our irrational, self-seeking instinctual desires. There must be a greater standard of good that informs both our quest for knowledge and the way in which we seek to apply that knowledge to the greater world around us. He ends his essay with the following:
"The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is not the same as to see."
If, in our approach to our world, we are not seeking knowledge as a means of understanding the opaque behind the transparent, we are completely missing the point. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book, Sources of the Self (which I've just begun to try and tackle - it's huge), looks extensively at the modern idea of identity (well, at how the modern view of identity has come about). He also sees man as formulating identity based on what he does rather than on some objective standard outside of himself that informs his view of identity:
"Much contemporary moral philosophy, particularly but not only in the English-speaking world, has given such a narrow focus to morality that some of the crucial connections I want to draw here are incomprehensible in its terms. This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for the notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance..."
It's not about me! I cannot make my decisions based on how I feel or what makes me happy or on what is rationally and scientifically the decision with the least percentage of error. Instead, there is something greater, a universal standard of what is good (which Lewis calls the Tao) that each of my decisions must be motivated by. It's not that making magnanimous decisions rejects the rational or the instinctual, it's not calling us all to be ascetics and to continually deny ourselves happiness... instead, it's this idea that, in my complete self-centeredness, my view of what will make me happy is so microscopic and distorted in comparison to God's view of my happiness, in his complete understanding of the ultimate "big picture" of humanity.
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