"Making Sense of God 6a" (Tim Keller)

TITLE: Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
AUTHOR: Tim Keller
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Viking Books, 2016, (330 pages).

Who am I? Who are you? Often, the answer depends on our upbringing, our links to certain institutions, or our roles and titles. In non-Western cultures, people are identified through their connections with their communities. In Western cultures, this is reversed via "expressed individualism." While it may be overly simplistic, this offers us a glimpse into the differences in mindset that contrasts "self-sacrifice" from "self-assertion"; Keller even points out the hit movie Frozen's song that affirms the latter in Western culture. With secularism, the image of the modern man has become incoherent, illusory, crushing, and fracturing.

Question 6a: "The Problem with the Self: Question of Identity"
On Incoherent:
"First of all, our contemporary approach is incoherent. If you look into your heart to find your deep desires, you certainly will discover many of them. And you will discover something else - that they contradict one another. You may very much want a certain career, but then you fall in love with someone whom you also want very much. Because of the particular nature of both the career and the relationship, you realize you won't be able to have both. What you you going to do? You might insist that one of these desires - for career or love - must be deeper and more 'you,' but that's naive. Why assume that your internal desires are arranged in such an orderly way? Francis Spufford writes that you are 'a being whose wants make no sense, don't harmonise: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the same time. You're equipped. . . for farce or even tragedy more than you are for happy endings.

.....

Not only do your desires contradict, but they also are elusive. 'What are the wants of the self?' Bellah asks. 'For all its unmistakable presence and intensity on occasion, the experience of feeling good, like being in love, is so highly subjective that its distinguishing characteristics remain ineffable.'

And besides being contradictory and elusive, our desires constantly change. As I have said, part of having an identity is having a stable, core sense of who you are, day in and day out, in different settings and times. That is why the traditional way of forging an identity through connection with something solid outside the individual self made sense. But if your identity is just your desires, they are going to be changing all the time. If in every situation you seek your own self-interest responding in ways that get the approval and control you want at the moment, then identity essentially disappears. 'In the work of Erving Goffman. . . [comes the view that] there is no self at all. What seems to be a self is merely a series of emphasis on 'being yourself' apart from fixed social roles results in there being no sustained 'you' left, which is common to all situations." (123-4)


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