Humanism vs. Individualism

While Existentialism holds that the genesis of philosophical thinking rests with the individual and individual experience whose "existence precedes essence," Mormon Existentialism maintains a perspective advocating a collective universal and absolute reality whose nexus is God. It ascribes grounds to this on the concept of agency and the objective will to act with a moral objective. This perspective is entirely humanist and although theory is not grounded with individual experience, a reality of purpose and happiness in the continuum of existence for humanity is the basis of this philosophical thinking resting upon the love of God. 

With God as the nucleus, the humanist aim is elucidated through an understanding of His plan for us, the Plan of Salvation as spiritual essence precedes mortal existence. As spirits who lived pre-mortally, given the choice to enter conditional mortality with the gift of agency, the course and purpose of humanity is set to ultimately find its way back to Him. 

It was thus, not as pre-mortal spiritual selves but as selves to be challenged and tried by conditional mortal existence, through suffering and progression, to earn with authenticity a secure place in an eternal physical reality. The humanist understanding in the Classical sense is suggested here as each spirit who chooses conditional mortality has agency to realize the full measure of the self through hardship and difficulty of mortality. How else to prove quality, ability, integrity and endurance than when tried? 

For many, challenges of insignificance demonstrate character of insignificant worth, while for others, immense and seemingly insurmountable challenges met nobly or overcome proves character of immense worth. Such will proceed to an eternal physical reality that is unconditional in quality to the demonstration of mortal worth. 

This is the nature of the humanist quality of Mormon Existentialism, a realization of the measure of possibility and eternal purpose engendered by the love of God rather than hollow beginnings of theory recognized as the origins of Existentialism whose abrupt and disoriented birth of existence has little chance for a realization of happiness in proceeding essence.

What is Mormon Existentialism?

Existentialism has been defined as “the philosophical and cultural movement that holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the individual and the experiences of the individual.” Alternatively, it is defined as the philosophical theory which holds that neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices to understand the human condition, and that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. (Authenticity, in this context, is the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character.) 

"Mormon Existentialism” is the inverse of Existentialism and a personally based critique of it grounded in personal life experience and deeply pondering penetrative qualities by the fundamental principles and core beliefs of the LDS faith centered on the core reality that is Jesus Christ. 

These principles and core beliefs, when applied to an Existentialist context, may have an affective result of “Mormon Existentialist” value by its very nature. 

“Mormon Existentialism” affirms a starting point of thinking germane to the God of the universe. Further, it suggests that morality is an objective truth. Moral thinking and scientific thinking are not the lone path to truth- that is the essence and nature of the Spirit and this is the allowance for truth is to be realized. 

Authenticity is important, but what supersedes it is unity, specifically the eternal family. This philosophy advocates the idea that essence precedes existence as all lived as pre-mortal spirits. 

Meaning is the essence of life and is the result of free choices of *agency that build belief on truth in meaning. “Mormon Existentialists” support realism and have no patience for relativism. 

The nature of reality, ideas of temporality, mortality, purpose with reason, truth and eternity are some subjects explored by “Mormon Existentialism” in the context of the general state of existing. 

While Existentialism suffers from terminal angst in a perpetual crisis of existence, “Mormon Existentialism” offers a curative- the gospel of Jesus Christ thus effectuating purpose for being, reason for reality and happiness in this life and a fullness of joy through the eternities. 

Contradicting Kant’s proof of objective reality Nietzsche decided to make a myth of morality and introduced to the world nihilism, which was and continues to have a most ubiquitous impact subsequently and is the flavor of Existentialism. God never died in “Mormon Existentialism,” he was, is, and will always be. 

Another source is my own unique experience and over the future months of an untold duration, I would like to express this philosophical grounding in ways that have made a life of impossible odds one abounding in love, blessings, happiness and a completeness of gratitude for everything blessed upon us that is His doing. 

Although my life has been a frightful conflict of such incredible obstacles, I believe that my success and the rock that I stand on that is reality better known as the Gospel of Jesus Christ, unwavering and forever to endure, might provide answers, faith and hope for the many who suffer in so many ways who seek perspective and clarity. 

I hope to offer this through essential truths originating in the Gospel, manifest in my life, with triumphant success to let others know of these essential truths and also how the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has a fundamental nature to transform a life of impossibility to one of triumph- complete and whole.

Agency

Said Emmanuel Kant "One cannot provide objective reality for any theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is the condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the idea of God can only be proved by means of this idea, and hence only with a practical purpose, i.e., to act as though there is a God, and hence only for this purpose.”
Emanuel Kant

As much as most sane individuals take daily life for granted, the insane, the deeper thinkers, the naturally contemplative, and the philosophical, ask questions of life that most would not think to ask.  Not in certain terms.  When one asks, “Does reality exist?” this is a question that has challenged philosophers since Plato and concerns Kant (above), makes the naturally contemplative rich in thought, of the deep thinkers the idea is profound and perplexing, of the insane it can terrorize the mind for a life time, but to a sane mind simply asking the question my seem absurd.

What about when addressed in another way:  "How did man become to be?"  Or, “How did humanity as we know it today, develop,” or, “What is the reason for the being of humanity?”  These questions, when addressed on a more pragmatic level, will be much more confounding to even the most level headed thinker, and set them off their guard.  These are existential questions along with, “what is the purpose of being?”  “Does consciousness make us more human?”  “How can truth be proven?”  “Can anything be believed as an absolute?”  “Why are humans imperfect if they are to be at all?”  “Do I exist?”  This last question is the hardest and has stumped every philosopher who has attempted to solve it and still convolutes today’s post-structuralist thinkers including Derrida, whose deconstructionism is a breakdown by grant of the arbitrariness of reason, on all binary opposites of truth this this question is no longer trying to be solved... it is made more equivocal as age old truths melt away under deconstruction and nothing can be established in the traditional sense anymore.

Disregarding the fact that deconstruction is its own absolute thus negating the whole principle, Derrida, and many other high-minded philosophers felt pretty sure of themselves when post-structuralism was answered with deconstruction.  This is existentialism and it was as if they were seeking the worst, that they wanted desperately to prove the nihilism of Nietzsche, to arbitrate all truth and meaning leaving the idea of God left to the 19th century and no contemporary thinking person would possibly conceive of the absoluteness of God when Derridaian philosophy was around.

Deconstruction itself is as arbitrary as anything else and is a structure in the post-structuralist sense and is basically worthless outside of a novel theory.  The ideal takes an absolute; a man and a woman in marriage, takes the conventional ideas of man: bread winner, father to the children, handyman, pipe smoker, bank, and pairs it with the mother: cook, cleaner, washer, nurturer, care taker, seamstress, baker, chauffeur, laundress, and cheerleader.  Deconstruction swaps the opposites.  Dad becomes the home maker and the care taker and mother becomes the bread winner and bank and the roles are still established so this proves that the role of the man and the role of the women are only societally induced and informed… says deconstruction.  The conclusion is the absence of meaning.  The meaning of father is stripped bare and the meaning of mother is stripped bare… the existentialists triumph.

But!  The 20th century followers of the thinking of Nietzsche had not done all of their homework on Kant and had not considered an advanced theory that is simply called reconstructivism instead of deconstructionism and makes as much sense if not more.

Kank stated "One cannot provide objective reality for any theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is the condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom.”  It is true, I cannot prove reality beyond myself, but there is one condition of moral law (existing outside the self) that is axiom, or a given truth and this is freedom or agency.  Agency is the one fundamental of human existentialism that can be logically demonstrated to be a part of that existence yet exist beyond the self, thus proving that agency exists beyond mere subjectivity; there is authentic objectivity to it.

Take random stimuli, colors, noises, smells, sensations, impulses.  To them the natural human inclination, ruled by agency, is to attach meaning to any given set of these stimuli thus creating meaning.  Take two people who each hear the random sounds and stimuli from chaos and they both find the same meaning.  Take three, four, ten!  All ten, out of a chaos of sounds or stimuli arrive at the same meanings independently and collectively they agree.  This unity establishes meaning.

We have just reconstructed meaning.  When applied to that which is universal and understood as such by the many, we have established sure truth, and when that truth is judged to be unshakable by all of those who profess it, we understand this as absolute truth.  The more the individuals’ lives' are shaped by unique meanings, individualized truths as well as universalized truths, as each individual forms an identity through such that is authentic, a reality is created in this life different from any other. 

We, differ from beasts, not in the ability together with agency to choose between this or that, but to, in a way much more convincing as positivist science is always more agreeable than a negativist one, build meaning from a life that would otherwise be chaos, create truths agreed on, and formulate unique realities.  In these newly formed absolute states, many may come together to build systems of like learning, to build systems of manufacture, or more importantly, realize the common truth in the deity that is believed in and a system of beliefs that form the ideology of this religion, we call ours the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And it is the source of pure reality.

Special thanks to the research of Rob and Georgia Buchert and their Sound Installation “Agency Randomness Chaos” without, which, this thesis could not have manifest.

   

Temporality

“We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything, which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time,” said Martin Heidegger. 

The benefit of mortality and the temporal is the gift of progression. In temporality all is conditional, there is ebb and flow with the changing of seasons and the passing of time. Using this to an advantage, this brief mortality is ideally conditioned for conditional progression towards unconditional perfection. 

This is a novel concept for the Existentialist whose conception of time is relative.  The traditional model set by Heidegger was a relative prison where the mind acts, then consciousness realizes and withdraws, only then to move ahead.  He calls this state of consciousness a “null void of a nullity” we are ever filling.

To the Mormon Existentialist, this may or may not be true but is of little consequence as it fulfills our literal ideals for a plan of progression, albeit with less of a sense of agency than we like to think.  In this Heideggerian “continuum” theorized and schematically so accepted by  so many subsequently, time is nothing real or absolute but a condition of this never ending cycle upon which being rests.

This is not the laws of fundamental LDS Gospel principle as we understand it.  Time is a reality and has always been used for very real purposes beyond the personal.  It separated the Garden from the Telestial, it has demarcated dispensations, it delineates the meridian of time; there is nothing subjective about this.  

In this very real reality of mortality, what is even more incomprehensible, making of mortality something of a miracle in and of itself, is that there are two sides to the veil.  A spirit being can pass from one side. The mortal side where time exists, and may cross over to the other side, to a different state of reality, Christ’s reality, where time does not nor has ever existed.  This establishes further the objectivity of time.

Given these factors, instead of thinking of time working against us, we can think of it as one of our greatest allies as we come to be more like God and become Gods and Goddesses our selves.  With time, I’m a manner not too unlike the Heideggerian theory, ironically, we are perpetually faced with choices and we must put our consciousness to the test in response to these choices.  It is time that make the progression we experience, the delineation of growth, possible, and a progression upon which all of life follows, whether they choose to make the best of it, thinking of it as the University of Life, or make a waste of it and live a life of complacence and learn nothing and contribute nothing.

Given these earthly conditions, as each person strives to be more like God, they will literally be more prepared to co-exist closer in a state that is more compatible and can tolerate the conditions, a magnificent and incomprehensible to us as they are, as a pure state of reality without time.  None who walk the earth separated by a veil of forgetfulness can conceive of this, and one must be ready for its level of magnitude and live life in preparation, using time for this purpose, otherwise the eternities will be wasted as much as life was wasted without growth and without contribution… a sad reality for any son or daughter of Heavenly Father.

"Auguries of Innocence:" My Story

TO see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Auguries of Innocence
William Blake (1757–1827)

As I grew into the Church as a re-convert, it happened because I came to know truth. As I finished my formal university studies, my education actually was just beginning. I was only then to realize the importance of the spiritual, if only indirectly. I had been raised in a solid LDS family with a heritage that is traced through the pioneer trek and back to the Mayflower group when William Clark traversed the Atlantic in search for religious freedom. Because of him and because of the freedom offered in this choice land and because of the gospel of Jesus Christ brought back in its authentic form by Joseph Smith Jr., I have the choice to accept it once again in my life.

I left the Church when I was 19, I was in no way, shape or form ready to face any bishop about a missionary interview, even though I knew it to be the right thing. What I imagined would be a bishop in a state of shock. Of course this is untrue and any good bishop would have taken whatever time necessary, but my mental state was such that I could not believe this, that I could not be worth that, that there was no hope for me in the Church, and instead of getting myself spiritually aligned to serve a mission, I unofficially stopped going to Church and officially left for Europe on my own "mission.” 

The next twenty years, roughly spanning 1992 to the commencement of 2012, was a journey in deciding what my spiritual fate would be and using my agency to make my choice. Being a Mormon is very strong in me. I am many in a line of generations of eldest sons of eldest sons and the fourth generation with initials EEC directly going back to William who was my early spiritual forefather. I was destined to find truth once more. During this 20 year trial period, I never gave up on the Church, how ever much the counter worldly adversity weighed against it, as appealing and as "real" as it might look, how absolute and unavoidable it might seem, the scales were never absent of my devotion, that runs thickly in my veins, to the Church.

What happened when I left university, came home and then left home in 2005 to live on my own, was a burning in my heart, a yearning, and a renewed love and a realization of and for my family. The purpose of my having survived my trials was due to them and this was made very acute when, still in a time of acute danger, I tried twice to commit suicide very late at night, and both times, near death and once with my heart stopped I was saved miraculously by my father. Yet my mother's supportive role in my life had been just as real for my survival since my diagnosis, just as real as are all of my family who are my prime happiness in existence, and at this time of trial and change I embraced a joy in the being of my nieces and nephews who became more precious than life itself and who now make existence one of wonder and pleasure.

During this time of trial I, because it felt right, in 2007, started to attend Church again on a regular basis. At this point my spiritual journey was realized for I found truth in God. I had long since recognized and acknowledged His guiding hand in all aspects of my life... through the dark and desolate pathways of schizo-affective disorder, a God whom essentially, more over absolutely, carried me through a darkness of a low viscosity, who made bearable what would have been otherwise unbearable on my own, and had made my life, tailored to necessity by the symptoms of my affect, livable, even delightful and a unique entity that I am forever grateful for in its sublime simplicity and humility. These realizations, of the worth of family and the truth of God, specifically Jesus Christ and the role He has played in my life and how He leads me, guides me, and walks beside me moment to moment through still turbulent waters, were very real and true at the time and still are very real and true. Everything of this world suddenly seemed inconsequential, and that which had caused the most confusion and had been the source of unmeasurable personal and spiritual pain and a real hazard to my life and my value system suddenly and simply became insignificant and irritating... something that angered me.

It was something I now had the power to control as I was able to choose was right and true for me. As is the nature of truth, for those who are themselves true, they will know truth as distinguishable from illusion, I recognized clearly happiness from a life of pain caused by my inauthenticity to myself. As I had adhered to every decision made during the years of illness and blackness guided by God and choosing as if groping in the dark and going only by a feeling of right to flee from fear, so I knew this truth and the value of it being overcome in my life. As I who have been granted grace to live life by truth, I adhered to this truth as I adhere to all truth and do not go back on it. Of this I am certain.

I had other factors in my life that needed dealing with... to the world, cumulatively, these might seem like many and insurmountable... to me these were simply temporary temporal conditions of temporality and I met each one by one, head on, until I received my Melchizedek Priesthood honorably on August 24th of 2011 and in December 27 of 2011, I finally accomplished my "mission" as directed when I was 19, set off on a different course but a course set to find its way back to truth by God, I found Eternity with all of my brothers and sisters and my Mother and Father in the Temple.

What made this experience real and profound for me, what made these obstacles that many and most spend a lifetime overcoming one if they overcome any, what made them simply "had to do's" and nothing more, nothing really complicated, worldly distractions that had nothing to do with my familial relationship or my relationship to Jesus Christ, or Heavenly Father or the Spirit that can now dwell within me, or anything really real was the testimony that I relearned as I became reconverted culminating in the experience of the Temple. This testimony was relearned, not repeated. I had to learn it not as a child does or a young missionary does but as someone who has known the truth of the harshness of life, someone who knows knowledge well and the bloody history of humanity, someone who understands thinking well and who questions all through analysis, this being innate to my way of processing thought.

Coupled with a study of art at a level of depth and complexity that is due to my penetrative nature, as I was given the gift of art in my life as a light to guide me through darkness and its beauty and tradition giving me a self when I had none, I therefor took to my testimony on such an intellectual level as came naturally and was authentic to me as was the only way I could. A Gospel that could stand to my line of questioning and analysis, penetrative mind and sensitivity to truth, done because I had to know the only way I could, through logic not allowing myself to trust easily as I had seen so much blackness and falseness and was acute at distinguishing between truth and illusion, such a Gospel that could stand to my line of questioning and resonate with my spiritual self had to be true. At a critical point I did try other congregations. They simply did not have the truth.

As I fought on and as I met my challenges further with greater surety and courage, step by step, day by day I learned and relearned more about the gospel that was in essence what I knew in youth but now, not as a young man but a new man with a different mind, I was able to see something in it, specific somethings and universal somethings that thrilled and excited me and the more I learned of truth the more I could and will never go back on it, would not consider that as a possibility for a moment, it would mean denying Reality. For the first time in my life my answers were sure, my mind was more secure, I was standing on firm ground, my sense of self also more grounded, my feeling of self worth and esteem grew as never before, my hope for my mental wellbeing was and is real, my knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was and is absolute.

The simple things that I knew to cause me, personally, the greatest joy in my study of art, particularly the essence and natures of beauty and truth, was such not to be found in "the world" anywhere more acutely and wholly than in the eternal message taught by Jesus Christ. I had found my true self, a self more authentically spiritual than I could have believed or ever hoped to be amidst worldly pain and inner darkness. Several months prior to my Temple experience, in an undated journal entry, I, with a sense of submission and inspiration wrote in bold purple capital letters of colored pencil, "The Most Profound Event of My Life: I Have Been Searching For Reality For 17 Years and I Have Finally Found It In The Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

To myself at that point, considering all, I felt like I had to be exaggerating but in truth it was truth, it was my most profound event, and soon after another event of even greater magnitude would occur to me in the Temple that would be as true and would resonate even deeper as I recognized my sister Emily as Eternal and tears that might never have ceased flowed with ease and joy that I had never known in this mortal state. Grounded in this Reality I am still living the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I am blessed more and more each day and am awed by this, and am eternally grateful for the blessings I am showered with on a daily basis, and for what commensuration I know not.

This Reality grounded me securely and from it comes such truth that to deny it is unthinkable and to waver from the security, safe and distanced from my worldly obstacles, is to give up on an existence oriented towards greatness, not set on this mortality, for that I care little about outside of that which is truly real- family, friendship, faith, truth, goodness, virtue, integrity- and for this brief span I have already lived a life well and honorably lived, but oriented for eternal greatness... THAT is something to rejoice in! In this grounding and from my "relearning" of my testimony something beautiful happened, something that I can see now and can bravely say was meant to be, because it is, I have put my abilities to use, put my shoulder to the wheel and am making use of my "relearning" in a philosophy called Mormon Existentialism.

Like the above poem by William Blake, a humanist and Romantic poet with a keen sense of the spiritual and the Real, Mormon Existentialism expresses the full reality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the living authentic entity of the Mormon Church in the context of Reality as it exists beyond space and without time and unconditioned by mortality. It is a place where progression continues and perfection is possible, as in the poem, as is the possibility of living in accord together with the God of the Universe, something I personally find very appealing and aim towards. Like the poem, everything is possible, everything can be. This is counter to its ugly binary- traditional Existentialism- grounded on the nihilism of Nietzsche and which has subsequently laid ground for a questionable worldly reality of doubt where existence, naive and raw, precedes any essence and an "other" that is absurd to all other "others," casting an ugly shadow of anxiety and angst, tainting philosophical ideological inquiry today to which the idea of God is a joke and very little is possible for humanity in terms of any reality. This is the kind of thinking of those who think in terms too lofty to allow for truth or anything of the absolute especially the idea that the Universe has as its nexus a Supreme Being, a God.

For those with a questioning mind, for those who think analytically, and even for those expert on philosophical method as I am not, I challenge they to this Mormon Existentialist philosophy, I invite it to interrogation from the best of the philosophically minded and I have the security of mind and the assurance of The Spirit to be rest assured that this philosophy will hold true. If cornered and given opportunity, it will answer with truth and reason, two companions essentially linked as one must know the other to realize the first.