The Paradox of Relativism and Nihilism

Relativism and Nihilism are two philosophical systems that seem to have at least some prevalence in our postmodern world. Although I'm sure not all would agree with how I will be defining them since they are words that contain a plethora of meaning for various individuals, I use the word "relativism" as a philosophical system in which there are no absolutes and criteria is assessed by means of cultural and situational factors. I will use the word "nihilism" as a philosophical system in which all values are baseless and nothing can be known or communicated. These two systems fascinate me in their ability to absolutely deny the existence of absolutes.

Take relativism, for example. Relativists deny the existence of absolutes. But, think about this claim for a moment. In the denial of absolutes, you have created an absolute, for you have claimed that there are absolutely no absolutes. In less, of course, you meant that there are only no absolutes in certain contexts, which makes even less sense.

Then, of course, there's nihilism. Nihilists deny the existence of values and our ability to communicate with one another. As for the first claim (the denial of the existence of values), I wonder what sort of value Nihilists assess nihilism as being, for they certainly seem to hold the value of the denial of values, and the value of the denial of our ability to communicate with one another. Then there is the second claim (the denial of our ability to communicate with one another). Nihilism is a belief commonly held and expressed by multiple individuals. I'm not sure how the first nihilist communicated their nihilism to the second, but they apparently did, proving nihilism to be false. If we weren't able to communicate with one another, then I would not be able to even know what nihilism is. Since I have heard of nihilism, nihilism proves itself to be false.

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”

I've Got My Memories Always Inside of Me, But I Can't Go Back to How It Was

Apparently not many of those of you read this are fans of Stoic Philosophy, so let's try something else.

Family (an appropriate topic considering it is All Saint's Day) and Home are both words which carry lots of different meanings for lots of different people. For me, family doesn't have to include people who share your genetic code, but I do think that there has be some link of commonality in the relational bonds which tie us to those we consider to be "brothers" or "sisters" or "mothers" or "fathers", otherwise, their wouldn't be any reason for such labels to be used. Home fore me also does not simply mean the place where you are currently living, but carries the implication of the place where you feel most comfortable. The people I call family are certainly not all related to me (and there are some people who are related to me who I certainly wouldn't call family). In the past four years, not all of the places I have been living have been home. But, especially in college, family and home both become very fluid concepts.

Nowadays, when I make the long and arduous 45-minute trek to the house that my parents live in, it certainly doesn't feel like home (although they do feel like family). I feel welcome, I feel the warm embrace of hospitality, and I certainly feel like I am among friends and loved ones. However, I don't feel like I am home. I merely feel as though I am a guest in the home of someone else. A welcome guest, who can make himself "at home", but it's not my home. Not anymore.

This same feeling somewhat applies to the members of my more extended family. They feel more and more like acquaintances. Perhaps this has something to do with my tendency to maintain some level of emotional distance from even close friends due to past feelings of betrayal or abandonment, but perhaps not.

I've reached the point in my life where I will never be home again until I have created a home of my own, and to some extent the same applies to family. And as I stare into the abyss of adulthood, the abyss stares also into me. Or something like that.

So, I pose to you, o faithful reader, a two-pronged question: How do you define family and home?

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”

All Hail Mother Church and the Parishioner's Utopia

I've been thinking lately about the nature of relationship. Something my "postmodern, postliberal, postchurch, postpost" friends often place a high emphasis on in the life of the Christian believer is community, i.e. relationship. Some might try and play a semantics game and tell me that relationship and community aren't the same thing. Please, don't be one of those people. I often find myself wondering as I wander whether I believe that to be a fully fuctional human being I have to be communal, and on good days, I do. However, there are a lot of times that I find my experience of reality doesn't seem to map anyone else's. I worry this might be due to psychological factors in my family history, but I also worry that perhaps there is no community for me. I do not mean that I feel reject from the communion of Christian faith and fellowship, but I do feel as though I have little common ground with the rest of humanity, and I know that historically I am not the only one who has felt such intuitions. Writers like Soren Kierkegaard and Henry David Thoreau often questioned the validity of needing others to experience God. While I do believe there are drawbacks to such a system, I must admit it has a certain appeal. Perhaps I feel isolated, perhaps I grow weary of the shortcomings of other people (I am not speaking of anyone or anything in specific; I speak merely in vague generalizations). The answers seem unclear. For now, I will simply continue to wonder as I wander.

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”

Not All Who Wander Are Lost...But Maybe I Am

I've been thinking a lot lately about the issue of personal identity. To ask the trite and overused proverbial question: "Who Am I?" And I find that the answer is often a bundle of contradictions. Who I am is both light-hearted and stoic; poetic and analytical; right and wrong; a loner who longs to be with people, and a shameful conformist. When I think about who I am, my biggest concern is that I might never know.

Self-reference is a sticky wicket, and often quite biased. I'm not sure we can consciously avoid seeing ourselves not as we are, but as we think we are. This may be by believing that we are a worse or better person than we might be in actuality, but ultimately brings about the same result: we cannot self-referentially know who we are.

However, the same problem arises in relying on the accounts of others to know who we are. Other people may certainly be able to offer important insight into who we are in spite of who we believe ourselves to be, but they do not know our thoughts or intentions, and therefore receive an incomplete analysis of who we are. This ultimately brings about the same result: we cannot know who we are simply from the testimony of the others.

Some sort of synthesis is required, but the problem is that we are unsure how to balance our own personal experiences of who we are with the testimony of others. Ultimately, regardless of who we are at this exact moment, our identities are in a constant state of flux and change, especially in a culture so adept at personal re-invention. It seems that we must turn to the words of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become...Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have." We are still becoming who we are.

“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”