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| which comes first?... |
At yet another go-around at the game of "Chicken and Egg", it turns out that Believing is what really matters.
Does having a Belief entail that I am aware that I have said Belief? What is a Belief, anyway? In which sense does it make sense even to speak of such a "thing"? And is it a "thing" anyway?
Belief does not, in the first instance, carry the logical structure of "something said of the external world". Rather, it has the structure of the believed. Believing, in turn, becomes prior to Belief, even if the two become necessarily intertwined as soon as Believing enters the picture.
Yet what is believed is also always something believed to be the case, even if what is believed is that something is false. In this case, we simply move one step up the ladder and see that what is really believed is that it is true that something is the case. In turn, that which which is believed false doesn't necessarily even carry the structure of a Belief, for someone would have to believe it in the first place for that to be the case. Welcome to politics, too, by the way.
Awareness of ones own believing becomes necessary only in that the awareness moves one not from the contrary to the belief but away from (often intellectual) agnosticism. Believing, in a certain sense, turns out to have a resemblance to the logical structure of Choice.
What of understanding of ones own believing? Certainly that's not necessary. What is it to understand that I believe a given something? The reference to the I makes the next step clear: It is to understand what it means for me that the believed is true, that is, what the consequences of my belief are. Believing without understanding, in turn, becomes a primitive (simple) sort of belief, it becomes a matter of chatter rather than earnesty. For what is he who believes in God but doesn't understand the consequences the Being of God has for him compared to the one who does understand? A false believer, even, we might even say.
Awareness without understanding is what makes possible the reduction of Believing into the Belief of chatter. Only where understanding has disappeared and the existential truth it entailed has gone with it can Belief, removed from its logical structure and consequently the believer who brought the Belief into Being, ever even appear as something which speaks of an "external world", "metaphysical truth" not to mention "correspondence". But it is an illusion, and nothing more. The only being of these Beliefs are as Chatter, and it is this status which drives forward the endless discussions surrounding them. Only because their Being truly does not contain anything beneath the surface does it seem that, once the trapdoor is opened to the eternal abyss below, there might be something to be found, explored, something to be learned. Except of course it's empty, and we ought to have known better. Diving into the depths, we forgot to look up and notice that what we thought was a trapdoor, the beginning of some great mystery, was nothing but a hole in an abysmally thin sheet of paper, a cheap photocopy of the real thing.
Time is running out. It's time to return to the surface. Your life is at stake.