I recently published a post on Instagram about the scepticism of being.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmq4k9SLqk0/
When I was asked to elaborate on this, I wrote the following. But it got too long for Instagram – that’s why it ended up here.
I hope that my answer isn’t too abstract. But in either case the concepts referred to are complex and it may require reading a few times over. The whole problem with philosophy is not really understanding it, but rather wrapping your head around what other people are trying to say.
The term „being“ probably needs to be defined. The problem is that in my post above, there is some interplay between different definitions, and they need to be defined precisely.
So, for the definitions: for every thing that exists, there is that thing in its actual existence, as well as the thing to us in our consciousness. For example, my brother exists as a person entirely apart from anybody’s perception. But there is also my brother as he exists in my own understanding (how I perceive him in my own head!). So there is my brother objectively, but also my brother to me.
The same thing applies to the very concept of reality itself. There is therefore the term „being“ (1) as it refers to the real world which exists outside of our own understanding, and then there is the term „being“ (2), which is how the real world exists within our own understanding — so, being to us.
This is indeed one of the things which distinguishes humans from the rest of creation: we have the ability to actually interact with the real world in our own minds. It is important to realise, however, that merely seeing reality with our eyes (when you look at a tree, for example) is not the same as understanding it. In the first case, your eyes provide you information about the light being reflected from the tree. In the second case, your mind creates a mental idea of the tree and projects it onto your consciousness in order to interpret the visual information you are receiving. In this case it becomes clear that we actually have a part of our consciousness which is responsible for projecting and creating a representation of reality in our own head, mind, and soul. (it can’t be any other way!)
But then an interesting question arises. What is this part of our consciousness which perceives the real world, and what role does it play? Is there only this part, or are there more layers and aspects? Do they compete with each other? There is also a part of our consciousness which consists in a reflection our own creaturely sensations, feelings, wants, etc. It is in a certain sense opposed to our outwardly oriented but that doesn’t mean it is bad.
If this being-oriented part of our minds literally bears reality to us (we don’t have direct access to reality – being (1), we experience it only through our minds in the sense of being (2)), is it possible that we can surpress or even ignore this part of our minds?
This is where the classical concept of virtue and vice comes in. It is indeed possible for humans to surpress or fail to live in the parts of their consciousness which bear reality to us. We call it vice. Pride, Greed, Hatred, Faithlessness, Sloth, Arrogance, Envy, Gluttony, etc.. All of these vices involve placing the creaturely self before the parts of us which bear reality to us and allowing them to fill our minds and control our behavior.
Virtue on the other hand is the opposite — in that we allow our minds to be filled with being(2), we conform minds and behavior more to truth and being (1). Justice, Love, Patience, Longsuffering, Humility, Commitment, Peace, etc., are virtually the opposite of vice because they involve us living in the parts of our mind oriented not towards our own creaturely sensations, pleasures, and needs, but rather towards truth and being.
That doesn’t mean that the creaturely parts of us are bad by any means (that has been considered a heresy by the church for the majority of its history), but rather that allowing them to control our consciousness and be dominant is bad.
I hope that was to some degree understandable!
But now the observations of the post come in.
This interacts with the the critiques of relativism. Relativism as a family of theories criticizes the human ability to know reality at all. It casts doubt upon our ability to come in contact with the real world. It considers truth claims and insisting on something to be true something rather reflective of narratives which preserve power and cultural structures in society. Since relativistic thought has been penetrating our culture for decades now, we are all affected by it. The underlying relativistic currents of thought are the reason we have such a hard time claiming to know something to be true even if we have a fair degree of confidence that we do indeed know it to be true. It is the reason why believing that someone is wrong is considered to be so offensive – because „truth“ is seen today more as a matter of preference than of a sincere conviction that something is the case.
But if you assume what we discussed earlier — that filling one’s consciousness with being and reality is highly connected with virtue, then the corollary of this is naturally that always doubting the existence or possibility of knowing being at all would naturally lead to vice. If we never have any realities which we can fix our minds on, we are left with only creaturely selves, and are cast out upon the stormy sea of our own selfishly oriented sensibilities. Relativist thought tends to usher away a concept of objective reality and replace the individual’s concept of reality as rather a reflection of the individual personality and the self.
It also works the other way around. In a late-capitalistic society which foments individualism as a tool to further generate revenue, we perpetuate the idea of consumption and constantly fulfilling the needs of the self. Individualism, which originally was a healthy insistence upon following one’s conscience, has now been inflated to equal nearly narcissism, and this narcissism is encouraged at every turn in our society.
Narcissism is, however, self-focused, and it therefore breeds further the estrangement from being characteristic of relativism. Those who have no external reality to submit have no choice or inhibition from simply further settling into themselves.
For this reason, the widespread „feeling“, let’s say of skepticism of being and objective reality is not merely an intellectual problem.