When people are young, their first galvanizing experience tends to
be their only galvanizing experience. Let’s say you grow up nominally
Christian with small-town values and a few vaguely-defined questions
and frustrations about life, parents, church, and your hometown.
You go away to college and you have a galvanizing experience with
existentialism (even though that’s a broad movement) through a great
professor and/or literature and/or philosophy and/or art. It’s like a
thunderclap or a revelation: suddenly existentialism makes sense to you
and addresses those vaguely-defined questions and frustrations. It
explains things is a way that makes sense to you where you are.
One way or the other, you follow the existentialist thread
throughout your college career because it provides an integrated point
of view, an organizing principle for all the random data and experience
of life. Your decision-making and values, for at least the first few
years out of college if not the rest of your life, are influenced
directly or indirectly by existentialism (if not by reading Nietzsche,
then maybe by watching David O. Russell or David Cronenberg movies).
The refreshing and enlightening experience of such a galvanization
is probably fuel enough to keep you going for years — meaning, you’re
probably not going to think, “OK, so, I had best be intellectually
thorough with this new philosophical orientation; I’ll go back and read
Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Neoplatonists, Confucians and Neo-Confucians,
Thomists and Neo-Thomists, Kant, Wittgenstein…” No, you probably won’t
be that intellectually thorough. You won’t need to do that much
homework, because that galvanizing experience of existentialism was
just what you (thought you) needed at that time, and it reoriented your
way of thinking and reorganized the world around you, and now you
cannot imagine needing anything more.
It’s probably the same with how some people experience Calvin, or
Aquinas, or C.S. Lewis, or innumerable others. When something feeds
you, you feast on it. Why stop feasting on something that tastes so
good and run around to all the other options on the buffet? You’re not
trying to fulfill some academic standard of intellectual thoroughness.
You’re trying to live a life. Read what feeds.
This, to me, is a fascinating psychological aspect of us as human beings. The actual content
of whatever produced the galvanizing experience could include a high
degree of truth, or a mix of truth and falsehoods in varying degrees,
or no truth at all. But many of us have those moments when a new system
or a point of view strikes the hot iron of who we are at a certain
moment.
