Kissing Frogs

Ever hear of a guy named Charles Sanders Pierce? It was while reading a collection of his essays in undergraduate school many years ago, that I became able to think for myself. History sings the praises of pioneers who had new thoughts: Marx, Freud, Darwin. But college doesn't necessarily give us the ability to think for ourselves. It feels like I discovered it by accident, one Spring day, when a cartoon popped into my mind.
Things you need to know to have a better understanding of why I thought the way I did before the cartoon moment:
I was raised by a mother who had embraced secular humanism. ( We can use reason to deduce the good the true and the beautiful. Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs. )
I was also raised by a Father and Step-Mother who were fallen-away Catholics. When I was 10 they started following a Guru from India. Thus I was indoctrinated into the belief that Jesus was one of many enlightened beings. The part of my life I spent in my father's home were not happy years. So I was not a fan of what I believed to be religion in general. Also my Father was openly disgusted with Christians. Without adult self-awareness, I accepted this notion as - well, gospel truth, which is funny when you consider that there were no Bibles in the homes in which I was raised.
So - with that in mind I want to share with you how Charles Sanders Pierce, the unknown philosopher who was the true father of American Pragmatism, taught me to think for myself.
It is pretty simple, really, what he taught me: Philosophers and Scientists had been switched in their cradles. We do not hold ideas in our minds, as Philosophers like to insist,we discover them in experience, like any good Empirical Scientist.
Thus it was that while discussing his ideas about what Philosophy's job was in a class 22 years ago that an image popped into my mind. Like a cartoon!
Before that moment of the cartoon, my working model of the act of thinking was; as people we choose to entertain thoughts, and those thoughts can be held up to logic and we can decide what to believe and proceed as reason dictates. Visualize the classic "ghost in the machine."
With the revelation that Pierce's writing provided, "We are scientists discovering beliefs", I saw, courtesy of an unexpected cartoon; myself and my classmates as bundles of statements walking around colliding with experiences. We did not determine the whole thinking process as sentient beings. We WERE our thoughts, and our thoughts were colliding with new information and being changed whether we wanted them to or not. I lost that sense of Cartesian mind/body duality.
Without the idea that I was a brain in a body I realized there was no such thing as objectivity, wherein reason is the sovereign faculty - which is, in my opinion, the primary illusion that a liberal arts education rests upon. When I realized there was no such thing as objectivity I started to question all that stems from objectivity. I quickly noticed that we were expected to accept too many things as given - if you are curious please see Pius IX Syllabus of Errors. They are all there! And that is how I used a liberal arts degree to deconstruct modernity.
With Pragmatism I was able to side-step all the absurdity that goes with modernity - relativism, for one. That there is no God, for another. Oh how silly it is to proceed along that line of thought. Do you know, friend, that without faith in God, you can't even accomplish an act of kindness? You can try to be good, but you can't know with absolute certainty that the outcome of your good intentions will be good. ( Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir )
Pierce introduced the fact the we were objects in a field of other objects. We do not decide or dictate the contents of our mind - our thought is the product of our experiences.
I began to wonder - are our experiences random or is some greater being making things occur? The only way I could know was by experimenting. Eventually, I reconsidered the tossed aside notion that Religion was bad.
I only did what Pierce suggested - when it came to my guiding beliefs, such as Who am I? What is my life for? What makes anything have any meaning? I acted as a scientist would: I tried out different beliefs, and I looked for consequences. If a certain belief had a consequence that made me less able to handle my life - then that was a bad belief. If a certain belief helped me to survive or feel health of mind - I deemed it to be true.
Eventually I was able to pull the Bible back out of my Father's discard pile - you can do this kind of thing if you take nothing for granted. You can "discover" Truth.
It takes a long time to get to mental health, or Truth, in this way. But I find it pretty comforting, personally. There is hope for people who are willing to try on thoughts, or kiss frogs.
Have you ever heard the statement "If you want a Prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs." ? Oh the frogs, the frogs. That is a story for another time. And anyway, He's really a King.