Faith Over Reason
Friedrich Nietzsche
“This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
Our perspective determines which steps we take, when, where, and how – what we see directs the path we travel. Our perspective is greatly influenced by the object of our desire – our preferred destination. If one travels the desert in search of water, their eyes will be attuned to the signs indicating water and block out irrelevant peripherals. And why does one seek water in the desert? – because it is the source of life and their most desperate resource.
When considering the path we choose to walk in our personal journeys through life, we are similarly directed by this process. What we see and the path we travel is guided by our most fundamental values – the objects of our desire. We can rationalize our actions based on their consistency with these values, but the beliefs and passions that form the axioms of our behavior don’t appear to have any mathematical formulation or empirical support in the least. The origins of our value systems seem to be far too ancient for any of us to completely understand. We act, but we are unsure about why we act – and perhaps that it is a good thing.
The mystery behind our sense of meaning and purpose remains buried beneath an incomprehensible universe. Nevertheless, we are driven by these invisible and intangible forces; forces that cannot be measured, weighed, or controlled. And in the modern age, under the paradigm of the scientific method, this becomes problematic.
The Truth, in its totality, is far greater than the imagination can conceive. No man possesses the Truth as a whole; we’re tragically fated to only grasp a piece of it. But because mankind is so enamored with facts, logic and evidence – the tools of reason – they operate on the premise that the Truth can be revealed through experimentation and logical consistency. They confuse Truth with fact. Facts are nothing – they mean nothing. Facts only become purposeful when they can be used to support something meaningful, and what is meaningful remains in contention.
The tools of reason are cold and inert; they cannot be used to form the foundations of those values from which we become animate. So when contemporary philosophers, scientists, politicians, and even the common man attempt to justify their beliefs based on reason alone, they are ultimately doomed to fail in their efforts. Science and logic are powerful tools of excavation to uncover facts, but at the depths of the canyon from which they dig, the question of why will always echo back to them.
Therefore, it is the tragedy of our species to contend with one another through irrational means. There is a time and place for rational debate, but when value systems collide, there is no reasonable recourse. If we wish to preserve our values and beliefs, we must place faith in these ideas and trust that they are worth defending, or else see them extinguished. When every man fights for his perspective of the Truth, the whole of it will survive.