GOD-IN-THE-MIDDLE: PART THREE

GOD – IN – THE – MIDDLE

 PART THREE 

 “The Inner Self as Legacy to the Enlightenment.” 

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. © February 8, 2019 

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. 

Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment (2018) 

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE 

It all started 500 years ago. 

In the West, the idea of identity was born during The Protestant Reformation. It was launched by a bold and apocryphal move by Martin Luther in 1517 to post his protests to Catholic Church indulgences on the Wittenberg church door. 

The quiet Augustinian friar had struggled for ten years with his inner self while he read and taught and performed his duties as a priest. Biographer Richard Marius in “Martin Luther” (1999) saw the monk as a Christian between God and Death: 

"He found himself in a state of despair before God. He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.” 

Luther came to understand that the Church acted only on the outer person through such rituals as confession, penance, tithing and worship of the saints. None of which could make a difference in one’s authentic existence because grace did not need a church as grace was a free act of a loving God. Thus Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to validate the “inner self” over the external social being. 

He insisted that man had a twofold nature: an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being, but only the inner man could be renewed. This placed the individual, paradoxically, in the center of the dialogue on the nature of man. By the single act of making faith alone the central doctrine of Protestantism, it undercut the 1500 legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. 

That said the Church remained the intermediary between man and God, but it could only shape the outer man through its rites and rituals, ceremonies and works. It could not touch the inner man by rationale and definition. Luther was not the disgruntled teenager brought back to obedience by society, but rather through due diligence and initiative, he put on notice that society itself would now have to adjust to the demands of the inner person. The idea of democracy would have to gestate for more than 250 years. 

 Nothing again would be the same in Christendom as this marked the beginning of the decline of the Universal (Catholic) Church and the rise of scores of alternative churches with God in the middle. Whether the monumental changes that led to modernity can be put at the door of Wittenberg and Luther or not, a series of propitious changes occurred in rapid succession. 

In 1439 Gutenberg had invented the movable type printing press. Books now flourished in the 1530s with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German to create a sense of identity among the German people. Translations of the Bible in other languages had the same affect. New ideas on trade and commerce sparked the creation of what would be eventually called capitalism. 

This gave rapid rise to industrialization with new methods of producing goods and delivering services as material forces were being driven by new technologies legitimized by the changes in the way people thought about things. On the plane of ideas, the distinction between the inner and outer, seeded by Luther, would occupy philosophers for generations to come as modern man struggled with the new idea of personal identity as identity with the Church faded. 

[My own empirical work over the past fifty years has found me exploring the deep layers of the “inner self” from the conscious to the subconscious to the subtext level of confidence which ensures identity is axiomatic.] 

Read the “Confessions of St. Augustine” and you will see that this Christian of the 4th and 5th century took such a private introspective journey to uncover his “inner self,” although he did not disparage the Church in this quest, or feel the necessity of a new identity, but remained an institutional Roman Catholic to the end. In that same vein, while rejecting the Universal Church, Luther accepted completely the legitimacy and underlying truth of Christianity. Marius in his Martin Luther biography (The Christian Between God and Death) documents the monk’s painful quest for personal clarity, questioning Church authority and the theology of penance. 

Then there was the auspicious timing of the “Reformation.” seeded as it was by the failed “Peasant’s War” of 1525 in which 100,000 of the 300,000 German peasant farmers were slaughtered by armies of the aristocracy of The Holy Roman Empire. 

In that climate, Luther resolutely attacks the celebrated cleric, Desiderius Erasmus, who remained in the Church to lead the Counter Reformation, making the young monk a rebel with a cause in an intellectual army of one. German American philosopher Hannah Arendt has an explanation for this while referencing her own disposition: 

“One first has to think in dialogue with oneself and reach an agreement with oneself. The principle of agreement with oneself is very old. It was actually discovered by Socrates whose central tenet, as formulated by Plato, is contained in the sentence: ‘Since I am one, it is better for me to disagree with the whole world than to be in disagreement with myself.’” 

This is consistent with the idea that one must conduct oneself in such a way that the principle of one’s actions becomes a general law – Kant’s categorical imperative – based upon the necessity for rational thought to agree with itself. 

[Those in modern times who agree with this rationale have likely been influenced by David Riesman’s book, “The Lonely Crowd” (1950). Riesman came up with the idea of the “inner-directed” and “outer-directed” person, with the former personality self-directed and self-reliant, while the latter personality tending to be a conformist and pleaser, or part of the herd mentality.] 

THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT & SOME OF ITS PHILOSOPHICAL LIGHTS 

By the end of the 18th century, the “inner man” was the core of modern identity and had evolved into a secular form. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau played a central role in this identity. His thinking would lead to such modern trends as democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism. 

For Rousseau, the natural goodness of the “inner self” was a theme tied to his political, social and personal writing. Luther believed in Original Sin and human beings as fallen creatures redeemable by God’s love, alone. Rousseau in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued that the first human being as man in the state of nature was not sinful. He romanticizes early man for whom sex was natural but not the family; where sin and evil – jealousy, greed, violence and hatred did not exist. There was no original society. For him, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. In Rousseau’s account, man’s descent into society began by the mastering of animals. 

Man started to cooperate for his mutual protection and with that surfaced the idea of pride and the perception of relationships. This was given expression in words: great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other comparisons. The ability to compare and to evaluate other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness. Rousseau denounces the shift from “love of self” to “self-love” or vanity, seeing self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition. From hunters and gatherers, human beings became farmers with the necessity of accumulating property. 

He writes in the Discourse: 

The first person who having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simpleminded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. 

Rousseau argues crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors followed. He attempts to walk mankind back with the first lines of his famous The Social Contract: 

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. These “chains” are the constraints placed on the freedom of citizens in modern states. 

Francis Fukuyama in “Identity” (2018) traces Rousseau’s sentiments to morphing to what are called today, “identity politics.” 

We see this in the United States Congress where polarity and gridlock prevent consensus and cooperation, and therefore effective governance. What Rousseau asserts is that a thing called “society,” exists outside the individual. Indeed, on the corporate organizational level, a mass of rules, regulations, relationships, injunctions and customs have become an obstacle to the realization of human potential, and therefore, human happiness. 

The reason for this French philosopher's continued relevance is that he saw a sharp distinction between the “inner self” and the “outer society.” But unlike Luther, the freedom of the inner individual does not lie only in his ability to accept the grace of God. But rather, it lies in the natural ability of the individual to experience the sentiments of existence free of layers of accumulated social convention. In this sense, it is similar to Isiah Berlin’s idea of “negative freedom” discussed elsewhere in these missives. Fukuyama sees Rousseau’s secularization of the “inner self” from social convention as the stepping stone to the modern idea of identity and recognition. In other words, the pressing dominance of social convention, now more intense than ever before through social media, is the foundation of human unhappiness manifested in a psychotherapy and drug dependent society. 

Fukuyama writes: 

The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval. 

Of course, we know while much of what Rousseau espouses had merit he was wrong about man, early man or otherwise, being one-dimensional. We also know that feelings of pride and self-esteem can be effectively manipulated by parents, teachers, preachers, bosses, advertisers, the media, entertainers, politicians and friends to ends not necessarily in our own best interests. It is no accident that we are essentially a robotic society given to be mobilized by special interests to their given ends. We see this when asked to respond to why we think, believe, behave and feel about God, religion, work, marriage, the government, education or the basis of the choices we make. 

That is because all the characteristics that make up the “inner self” are not fixed. The evidence? We may run away from the idea of God, for example, but be as resolute in our new belief system as we had been before. The same relates to work and marriage and life in general. We constantly run back into ourselves repeating the same errors in the new situation that we rebelled against in the old. We cannot lose ourselves. 

German philosopher Immanuel Kant, like Rousseau, wrestled with this in terms of reason and moral choice. Kant asserts that we can point to nothing as unconditionally good other than good will and the capacity for moral choice. He did not see this as a Christian concept or in religious terms, but as the ability to follow strict rules of reason for their own sake. The human capacity for moral choice means that we are not machines subject to the laws of physics, but can be moral agents independent of our material environment. 

Because we have the capacity to reason, Kant insists, moral choice does not need to be treated as ends to other means, but ends in themselves. We manifest good will not because of what it will lead to but for its own sake. Human dignity revolves around the human will where we are genuine agents of uncaused causes. 

THE “INNER SELF” & INDIVIDUALISM 

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel accepted the link between moral choice and human dignity with the individual a morally free agent and not simply a rational machine seeking maximum satisfaction. But unlike Rousseau and Kant, he put recognition at the center of the human condition. He advised: 

From birth on human history is driven by a struggle for recognition. This drives the soldier to risk his life, not for territory, not for wealth, but for recognition itself as a patriotic citizen. 

A worker doesn’t simply work for wages and benefits but for the acquired dignity and recognition of what he is doing. We know who we are by what we do. For Hegel, however, it is not primarily an individual journey into the self as with Rousseau, but politically motivated. The great conflict of his day was the French Revolution and the “Rights of Man.” 

By the early 19th century, the elements of the modern concept of equal dignity for everyone under the law was the mantra of the American Revolution (1776) and French Revolution (1789) with the understanding that the dignity of the “inner self” rests on its moral freedom. The democratic upsurge that would unfold in the two centuries after these revolutions was driven by peoples demanding recognition of their political personhood. 

Expressive individualism would also be seeded by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith and then British philosophers John Locke and finally by John Stuart Mill. They put a pragmatic and empirical stamp on the movement towards capitalism in economics and to democracy in politics. Smith’s laissez-faire philosophy was to minimize the role of government intervention and taxation in free market economies with the idea of an “invisible hand” guiding the supply and demand of commerce.

Locke focused on human motivation and behavior, believing human nature allowed people to be selfish with the natural tendency to follow their self-interests. Mill was the most influential English language philosopher of the 19th century whose work explored the consequences of a thoroughgoing empiricist outlook. These “Enlightened Age” thinkers believed that successful governance depends not on idealism but balance between individual freedom and political equality; between the state exercising legitimate power and institutional laws and accountability providing the appropriate constrains. It was Mill, however, who put temperance into his philosophy advocating population limits and slowed economic growth. He believed this would be equally beneficial to the environment and the public good. He was a naturalist, a utilitarian and a liberal who cautioned: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” 

THE “INNER SELF” BECOMES OBSESSIVE INTRODUCING A NEW MODERN ERA 

The expression of the “inner self” soon became the key to dignity and recognition. Christianity universalized people being capable of moral choice. This was secularized by Kant in the form of rational moral rules. 

Rousseau added the idea that the inner moral self was not just capable of binary moral choice, good or evil, but was filled with personal feelings suppressed by the surrounding society. Dignity now centered on the recovery of that authentic “inner self” that society must recognize in every human being. Rousseau’s powerful idea is that each individual has an “inner self” buried deep within; that it is unique and a source of creativity; that this self has equal value to all others; that this self is expressed through feelings and not through reason; and that this “inner self” is the basis of human dignity, recognized in such political documents as the American Declaration of Independence. Rousseau’s influence is obvious in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh; in the novels of Franz Kafka; and in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche who expanded the scope of human autonomy with the figure of Zarathustra and individualism in Beyond Good and Evil. 

By the late 20th century, the scope of the “inner self” and individual autonomy reached a fever pitch with the clamor to define one’s own existence as well as the meaning of life irrespective of what society, the government or the church promoted. In the Christian tradition, the “inner self” was the source of Original Sin, but now it was simply moral choice. 

A wave of promoters of self-esteem and personal improvement followed. There was Abraham Maslow “Hierarchy of Needs,” Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” who also wrote a book, “Self-Esteem: The New Revolution,” and Robert Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life.” 

More than 30 percent of the American upper middle class was in therapy complaining of lacking self-esteem and happiness, while being in the top 10 percent of the American economy in terms of income. Today, they are supporting more than a half million psychotherapists across the United States. 

Christopher Lasch argued against this trend in "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979) insisting that the obsession with human potential and self-esteem would instead lead to crippling invasive cultural self-indulgence. This would in term lead to the depoliticizing of society in which social justice would be reduced to personal angst and psychological problems. Lasch died more than a score of years before Donald Trump, a nonpolitician, would become President of the United States. Lasch could envision the long decline of the United States accompanied by the rapid rise of a therapeutic society dependent on psychotherapy. 

Bernard Zilbergeld would confirm this prognosis four years later in “The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change” (1983). Today, the question of identity has become central to the life of many Americans. We now have battles over ethnicity, sexual identity, sexual politics, sexual orientation, gay rights, racial equality (“Black Lives Matter!), gender politics, religion, God, the meaning of life, inequality, ecology, feminism, Native Americanism, capitalism, socialism, communism, social justice, human biology, education, liberalism, conservatism, self-esteem, dignity, recognition, freedom (negative & positive), happiness, social responsibility, moral responsibility, robotics, automation, good and evil, spiritualism, materialism, multiculturalism, war, peace, nuclear holocaust, environmentalism, global warming, civil war, national identity, ethno nationalism, radicalism, immigration, personhood, the common good, ethnic cleansing, hegemony, terrorism, civil religion, civil liberty, professionalism, work ethic, knowledge power, position power, politics of anger, polarization, gridlock, natural language, national language, citizenship, crime, wealth, poverty, celebrity worship, cyberspace, “Big Brother,” dystopia, and the beat goes on. 

Identity and the “inner self” has come to underlie philosophy and the political climate today, yet identity and this buried “inner self” in us all is neither fixed nor given to us by the accident of birth. This sense of identity can be used to divide or unite us, or pragmatically integrate us. This will happen when we lose our fascination to stand apart and complain about everything.