Secular Wholeness: A Skeptic's Paths to a Richer Life by David Cortesi

Author:David Cortesi [Cortesi, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion & Spirituality, Skepticism, Spirituality
Amazon: B000UD5UAC
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Published: 2006-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

Publishing a self-definition

One tragedy of life is that nobody else will ever comprehend your personal history as you understand it. There's no way to download your memories in full to somebody else (although, pathetically, we often try). Words are inadequate; and anyway, there's no audience with the patience to sit through the whole story.

Yet we have strong practical reasons for letting other people know how we currently understand ourselves. It is also useful to quickly learn other peoples' self-definitions. And this is why we dress our bodies and furnish our lives with material symbols: in order to summarize ourselves to others. In gesture and accent, in choice of possessions and style of facial hair, in a thousand subtle ways we advertise what we think to be our own present co-ordinates and direction in life-space. This is a communal effort using a common language: we continually read other peoples' advertisements and adjust our own to match theirs, or to compete with them.

In adolescence, the whole thing seemed impossibly difficult. Like many, I adopted a public attitude of scorn toward the "pretension" of dress, of "fitting a niche." And, of course, I dressed and wore my hair in a way that advertised how I saw myself in relation to the communal language of dress and hair, like someone chanting "English is trivial," in English. The only way to really step out of the game of self-advertisement is to step completely out of society.

But the idea of a human life lived in complete isolation, without reference to a society even for contrast, is almost as hard to conceive as the sound of one hand clapping. We have no choice but to define ourselves using the symbology that is understood in our community; and have no choice but to interact with other people on the basis of their self-descriptions given in the same language.

In short, why we have to define ourselves is to establish and justify our place in a community; and how we do it is by using the cultural symbols that are understood in that community; and why we bother is because other people are of critical importance to our own health and happiness (as discussed in Chapter 3).

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