being one’s self or realizing one’s authentic self, or it can violate common ethics by appealing to its Absolute, it cannot be anything other than dehumanizing.
If religious institutions could settle even for “God” as “Relation,” it could eliminate much criticism and false expectations. “God” would then be the connection everything in the universe has to everything else, by which humans are able to assign “meaning” in their lives.12 But “God” would still neither have to be thought of as a conscious being or conscious connection, nor some power that intended or planned from eternity—all of which modern theology and science finds difficult to justify—but just the reality of relation, similar to our assumption of the reality of “space” or “time.” “Relation” seems superior to “space” and “time” in the sense that people find meaning in “relations” even more than within their mere existence within space or time. When they die, the relations they are thereby terminating are their central concerns, not space, time, substance, and so forth. They all appear together and work together as well as dissipate together, but the “relations” provide more meaning to life, just as the “manifold” sense impressions for Kant were brought into a synthetic whole, or the way confrontation with individual entities always implies or attaches to generic or universals for any understanding or communication, as Eco says.13
In a totally free mutual relation, there is the continuing possibility of the discovery or realization of my “self” vis-à-vis the other or even within the other, which occurs in tandem with the other’s discovery of his or her “self” in my self. This discovery of self or self-realization is neither some substance nor merely some acknowledgment of an abstract bare essence common to all humanity, much less, one’s mere being. To the contrary, it involves the freedom to either be or not be the self, with all of its concrete particularities, that is, the complex freedom of one’s subjectivity, one’s consciousness of the “other,” and therefore of making choices, as Sartre spelled out, of one’s being one’s own project.14 It can occur only in mutual trust, interacting with another person’s free subjectivity or with related choices. The self’s greatest burden is heteronomy, of being told or treated as one who cannot or should not think for oneself, as one incapable of choosing the person one wants to be, or, as religions put it, one must have God, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Amon-Re, Zeus, OM, NAM, or other (terms for deity or equivalents) to dictate one’s whole life and goals. Self and self-integrity disappear in one fell swoop.
Many people speak of our culture as having become too “secular,” or having experienced a “loss of faith.” Others contend that faith unleashes too many negative consequences on the social order or it presents a potential disastrous conflict between religious groups in their antiquated and inhuman claims. So their answer is that faith must be restrained by civil law—not the ideas or ideals of faith, but the actions of the believers.15 Some think that the uncivil or antisocial actions of religious people stem spontaneously and apparently naturally from their articulated beliefs or sacred documents, so it would be better that the whole specific religion or perhaps even all religions, come to an end, however that would happen.16 Perhaps to continue to speak of “faith” does carry too many negative overtones from the past inhumane doctrines and postures, even as the idea of a “personal God” is confusing because it is so easily taken literally, and at that very point becomes less than ultimate, even as some theologians have said, becomes idolatry. But the secular world has not yet cleansed itself of atrocities and inhumane programs either. Both religious and secular institutions involve ambiguity. So it is not a simple either/or—either to be religious or to be secular—since humans are humans, as James Madison noted, not exactly “angels.” But ideals and reality can be related meaningfully only if the communication involves the intelligible world, not just imagination or myth.
If we utilize the word “trust,” however, it may be possible for it to embody the most positive elements of “faith” as mutual self-discovery, and thus vitally sponsoring self-integrity while separating it from inherent negative meanings and connotations of “faith” as blind or nonrational leaping without thinking or any reflection at all. In the most social sense, faith as trust lies at the heart of all religion but also all human life and institutions, certainly including the secular. So while certain mythological, partisan, crude, and violent understandings of faith should come to an end if humanity and civil society are to continue, no human existence will be able to function without trust, as the acceptance of the risk and potential reward of mutual self-realization within all interdependent human relationships. Real trust, however, is always mutually autonomous and presently personal; it cannot be forced on one by another, nor is it about trusting something that is past and done, which cannot be changed. Those are crucial differences.
Whether Reverend Wilmot maintained his “self-integrity” through his “demission” and reduction to an ineffective and lost personality, unable to escape self-pity, or whether in that process he really lost himself, and allowed the problem of heteronomy/autonomy to dissolve him from the inside out, is perhaps moot. One thing is sure, he was never a fully integrated self as a minister nor after, once he began extensive reading that created doubt in his mind since something within him seemed to demand absolute certainty. The same overpowering desire of Absolute certainty has continued to drive much modern and postmodern Christian theology through its nineteenth century Absolute idealism into existentialist or phenomenological ontology into a primary focus on difference and otherness in which one can even ironically distinguish actuality from factuality, which is still driven by the apparent felt need for Absolute certainty.17 Was there something in Reverend Wilmot’s own background that prevented him from exercising thorough autonomy from the very outset of his ministry or even in the days of his theological training? Was the picture of the ministry at first so connected in his mind with the Absolute that the positions given at seminary had to be readily accepted en toto without his own personal examination and tailoring or qualification? Was he so concerned to please others that he simply would never “rock the boat” if possible, and when he finally did, he was the first to drown? Or was it all a personality quirk? Or was there something very sinister about authoritarianism and heteronomy?
Consider the question about heteronomy or authoritarianism: When the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined “enlightenment” in 1784 as a moving beyond our “self-incurred tutelage,” or “self-caused immaturity,” he defined this “immaturity” as “the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.”18 It was “self-incurred.” He blamed that condition not on a lack of intelligence but rather a lack of courage, a comfort and security people find in allowing others to do their thinking for them, whether that other is a parent, pastor, book, doctor, politician, or an alleged god. It is difficult for an individual to find the courage to trust himself or herself to think independently rather than depend totally on others. Or is that really true? Or is it a fact that children learn of the right of the “other” to make decisions for it, and if it is not encouraged at young ages to make many of its own decisions, it will be stunted in its process of becoming a responsible adult? The problem occurs when other authorities not only do not encourage the individual to make his own decision, but explicitly demean his ability and right to do so. The individual somehow has to learn that he has a voice even within the legal structures whose authority he cannot defy but can affect by voting legislators in or out of office. However, in the realm of religion, the individual often has almost no voice, and the “authorities” stand on a received tradition or text that they teach is not challengeable, while they themselves warn of how difficult and dangerous such independent thinking would be, as well as the uncertainty as to where such thinking could lead. Sometimes that mentality is still encountered even in seminaries as they prepare or indoctrinate potential clergy. Otherwise, why would Reverend Wilmot have thought he was “losing” his faith rather than improving his faith? That is the Absolute that causes the “earthquake” in the quotation from Susan Jacoby we earlier gave, “an earthquake in which the ground never stops shaking.”
Kant admitted that the private use of one’s reason may need to be restricted, but it can be without threatening the public use of reason. If a soldier, given an order
