Thinking and Believing

Be ready for the digression.

If thinking is human thought generation, then what is believing? One can certainly have a thought they don't think is true. But does the word "belief" mean truth?

Reid was famous for writing that the majority of human problems could be cleared up through language. Which makes one wonder why, if true, that we don't have linguistic/critical thinking classes in elementary school. We do however teach young children that magical beings control your life, provide free will and then take it away, and answer magical prayers for some people and not others.

One way of imaging it is that "thinking" is a shared experience and "belief" is an individual one. Most talking is an expression of what is going on in one's head. And most of the time this is merely thoughts; it is an expression of how I see the world. The intention of most language is social - it is draw people in or push them away. Even a simple comment about the weather is one intended to created a shared experience. We are both experiencing this nice weather.

However, belief is individuated. This is why you can't actually change anyone's mind about truthful or moral convictions. Socrates understood this and created a life-long game of using irony and self-deprecation to achieve a new form of persuasion that ended in him being put to death.

When someone believes a thing to be true, like a moral premise, they don't actually share that belief with anyone. They may articulate it, but imagine it like an independent particle floating in space. It does not actually "touch" anything. It is an entity to itself. So, in this sense, belief is wholly different from just thinking.

Is this the same as our earlier discussion of open-mindedness v. conviction? I don't know. That discussion was about the discipline of philosophy and how perpetual open-mindedness is the ultimate goal for most writers in the past three hundred years. This is opposed to conviction. Imagine the difference between Russell summation about philosophy being used to "broaden our view of the world" (open-minded) and then Rand's tantrum about naturalism - that our own life is the ultimate goal.

That last part requires a little explanation. Most people don't read Rand seriously, so her Aristotelian premise is a little murky. If its true that philosophers must have one ultimate premise, they must have one thing on which everything else relies, for Rand this was life. We do all things ultimately to stay alive. She sees this almost as a scientist would, that we are driven by natural urges, when they are natural and when they are "normal," in such a way to sustain life.

My point here is that Rand believes this dogmatically (if there is any other way) and she shouts it from a pulpit and makes sure you know that in terms of this premise and some others above it that they are mandatory and that there is no gray area.

I am imagining, anyway, that common human thinking, whether or not it is open-minded and ultimately undecided, is a shared, social behavior. We tap into what we all experience in a way that enhancing the social experience. This works because we all have those experiences and because these thoughts describe a world in which we all live. But I am also imagining an individuated series of beliefs of which we are all capable, but of which we can attain one-by-one. Our beliefs are ours only. They are closed off and have a wall that separates us from the other humans around us. We can attempt to describe these beliefs and we can certainly attempt to convince others of their veracity, but these atomistic particles should probably be seen as lonely and isolated.

I am not here saying one is better than the other. Like rote v. process they are both mandatory, but unlike rote v. process, they are equal. They are two ways of experiencing and living our lives that will always both be necessary. It is mostly the clearing up of these words and concepts that will be of great use.

This may also be why, in the past couple blogs, I have suggested that most people don't believe anything. Most people are not actually "right" or "wrong" about anything because they aren't capable of real belief. They don't hold false beliefs, they belief nothing. This vacuum is what is filled with regret, misery, randomness, and eventually a kind of human-all-too-human lashing out (Nietzsche's word was ressentiment).

Excerpt from Wiki:

"In philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (/rəˌsɒ̃.tiˈmɒ̃/; French pronunciation: [ʁə.sɑ̃.ti.mɑ̃](listen)) is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. The concept was of particular interest to some 19th century thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration.[1] The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."

Kierkegaard, The Present Age

"The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels. Leveling is a silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals. In a burst of momentary enthusiasm people might, in their despondency, even long for a misfortune in order to feel the powers of life, but the apathy which follows is no more helped by a disturbance than an engineer leveling a piece of land. At its most violent a rebellion is like a volcanic eruption and drowns every other sound. At its maximum the leveling process is a deathly silence in which one can hear one’s own heart beat, a silence which nothing can pierce, in which everything is engulfed, powerless to resist."

Nothing describes Rand's theory (main theory, ad nauseam in The Fountainhead) better than this:

"Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure on to an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external 'evil.'" (Wiki, ibid)

PS. A little known word that Nietzsche sneaks in The Genealogy is "rancor," to suggest similar meaning.