Faith as Active Pursuit: Caring, Sharing, and Aesthetic Rationality in the Quest for Wholeness

To talk of a guiding idea for life is to commit to the possible; the idea is an ideal that must be achieved, an orientation that must be followed through. In a previous paper (Bolton, 1982) I suggested that this is the role of faith. Faith is the persistence active in the pursuit of the communal goods of caring and sharing. Driven by wonder, faith is characterised both by our resolution and by our availability in our efforts to make sense of our values. This is Paul Tillich’s "ultimate concern": the concern for the ultimate coherence of our experience, the identity which makes us fully human:

It is faith that inspires the commitment of our imagination, the "plunging forward" of intentionality that makes the world real for us, but it is faith too that allows us to acknowledge the necessity to surrender our subjectivity, to recognise that experience can only be fulfilled in that which can stand as its measure, and thus be sacred for us; and the meeting-point of commitment and the sacred object is where persons can meet to know one another and themselves. This is the essential structure which faith reflects upon. But this structure is neither merely factual nor an ideal essence divorced from actuality; it is an existential structure because it demands the realisation of the ideal in existence. That is, experience necessarily demonstrates this structure ‘as’ ideal’. Our lives cannot help but show themselves as achieving or failing to achieve the ideal which remains always available. (1982, p. 75)

We can return here, surely, to Vico’s idea of the work of the imagination, the need to test our thoughts and feelings against the contingencies of existence. For the task that faces us is not to simply confirm the uplifting force of the other condition but to situate that force within the contingent world which is inevitably full of both joy and sorrow. Poetry is both love and sorrow and is itself a constant reminder of the need for the presence of faith within us.

This is why there is no end to our need for the aesthetic which is the guardian of wonder. Wallace Stevens suggested that poetry is "a cure of the mind". It is so because we can return again and again to the works of art and human relationship that confirm our belief in a self-enhancing transcendence. These are acts of faith, the ways in which we recover, and remind our selves of our own vitality within a transcendent other. They are stored in our memories as decisive experiences - fixed points of consciousness of the other condition.

But is there not a stronger sense of faith than that which we have to recover time and time again? I mean the sense, not of the journeying self - one who, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, lives only for the journey - but that of the end of the journey, being at rest within the other condition, so that there is never again that sense of a movement away from the mundane to the transcendent and back again, since the distinction between the two no longer holds. We no longer seek faith, for we are faith: it is the furthest reach of a mind that has transcended itself in its identity with the other. We can see at once how such an orientation can register at first as a primary form of consciousness and then as a secondary form of a mind which can reflect upon its own being-in-the world.

Faith, then, works its wonders through sharing and caring. Two principles emerge from this orientation. First, there can be no divisiveness. Faith as an idea encompasses and points beyond the distinctions of belief and practice which serve to define traditional religious perspectives. It also outlaws the premature identifications of secular faiths such as communism or capitalism insofar as their practice sets individual against individual, nation against nation. From this perspective, the greatest task that confronts humanity in these divided times is to work towards a common faith that subsumes and welcomes a diversity of perspectives. Further, the achievement of such a purpose can only occur when individuals are able to place themselves within a social order which respects their contribution to the interchange of perspectives: a sensus communis guided by a common faith in a guiding purpose that offers a view of a transcending and coordinating reality. Only when we look to our selves within the community do wonder and faith prosper, for the common good is the necessary ground of faith and of its implementation amongst us.

In this way Dewey (1934) argued that in our present times there is no more urgent task than that of working for a common faith that supersedes traditional religions defined by the assumption of an already found authority which leads to their separate, distinct claims upon us. He makes a distinction between such religions and the religious, between the supernatural and the “supersensible”, the latter indicating those transcendent experiences which form the basis of the religious outlook. His fully recognises the communal nature of such an enterprise and identifies it as the work of the imagination within its social aspect. In an earlier chapter I refer to Kestenbaum’s (2002) case for the unity of the pragmatic and the transcendental in Dewey’s philosophy:

For Dewey, the intimation and appreciation of transcendent ideals allows us to cease effort, to steady faith and aspiration, and, through our best efforts, to take up the struggle. To miss, as Carney does, the intersection of effort and transcendence in pragmatism, one might say their desire for each other, is an inattentiveness with a very large consequence. We fail to see how practical matters, such as cutting open a body [in surgery] invite - and morally require - appreciative responses like awe, piety, and reverence. When the mind is a verb, especially ‘because’ the mind is a verb, it can aspire to such enlargements and transcendences of its motions and efforts. It is no easy matter, though, to attend to the intangible in the midst of the attention-draining of tangible and "thickest practicalities”. Vigilance is necessary. (p. 77)

This is to say that the transcendent, the faith of the mind in its ideal, may serve to guide and steady the practical, but it offers no detailed prescription for each and every circumstance. Faith is never reducible to a program of action since the effectiveness of its interventions in practical affairs lies in its transcendence of the practical, its retention of the mystery of the ideal. At the same time, the practical itself is not a static reality but one which changes as a result of human inventiveness. Therefore, faith itself must be an imaginative activity in its relations to the world of practice. Marcel (1964) referred to this as a "creative fidelity”, a faithfulness that is productive in it imagining the possibilities open to authentic or inauthentic response. Such a creative fidelity does not, then, divide its world into the ideal and the pragmatic, excluding one from the other, since the two are jointly defined in those acts in which we succeed in defining our identity within an always-changing, but, nevertheless, always transcendent world. Perhaps, then, we should set aside the possibility of any finality in our affairs, whether it is Vico’s barbarism that leads through its excess to a new life, or a paradise that is beyond life itself? Bur the first option appears undesirable, the latter the realm of angels.

The middle ground of a common faith, one in which faith itself is larger than any one of its social expressions, is, I believe, the only available course of action for our modern predicament: aesthetic rationality combines the sense of wonder, the power of ideas in forging universal ideals, and the forms of argument whose pragmatism is evident in the subtle selectivities of art, the essay, and the considered argument. The success of aesthetic truth does not, cannot, depend upon objective criteria external to its seeking, since its purpose is to seek a qualitative identity of our being in the world which is both inspiring and subtle enough to test itself against, and to portray, divergence and contradiction within the essential unity of its aspiration. It is faith in such purpose which sustains our caring for, and sharing with, one another. For these three aspects are interrelated and in their combination, we can sense a whole which satisfies our fundamental needs: our innermost need for an assured identity, our need to be part of a community in which that identity can be expressed, and the presence of a transcending ideal that exists as the confirmation of our efforts.

The ideal is a total correspondence of inner being, communal being, and transcendent being. Vico thought a form of this correspondence defined early societies: humans looked to the gods whose existence directly reflected back to human concerns, so that shared rituals could be deployed that defined a common response. It seems likely that such a pre-reflective consciousness remains a feature of our minds, and that we may return to it in those special experiences of unity. But the great human achievement has been to make an inner sense of “external” relations; those religious experiences, our own acts of caring and sharing in the rearing of children, and the development of friendship have become through reflection a feature of our own minds - ideas that point to ideals - with the result that we can now cultivate the ideal as that which both exists within to define our selves and points outwards to a universal applicability that can unite us in a common pursuit.

The first principle of Gestalt Psychology is that “the whole is other than the sum of its parts”. In objective rationality, the parts must be ordered through principles that form their closure in an all-inclusive summation. But aesthetic rationality is never a sum in this sense. Quite different, sometimes contradictory, parts are assembled in a way in which the differences between them are coordinated in an encompassing whole: the artist choosing the next stroke and colour, the composer, the next note, the speaker, the order which will best persuade the listeners, and so forth. This is the pragmatism of the aesthetic, the essayism (in the broader sense of that term as an experimental reflection), in which the differences noted take their place within the open, dynamic order of a whole, whose purpose is that of a coming-into-being, that is, of forming an identity. Whereas the objective informs us, the aesthetic speaks to us in the language of person to person and the wonder of art is not, of course, to provide solutions, but to create an identity which encourages a common pursuit available, in principle, to all.

References: Bolton, N. (1982). Forms of thought. In G. Underwood (Ed.), Aspects of consciousness (Vol. 3). Academic Press.
Dewey, J. (1934). A commonfaith (2nd ed.). Yale University Press.

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Marcel, G. (1964). Creative fidelity. Fordham University Press.
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