Faith During Philosophical Renovation
I wrote this note in 2022 after emerging from my great deconstruction with many hard-won treasures.
Sometimes, when you clean your room, things get messier before they get cleaner. You might need to empty all of your drawers to begin reorganizing. Philosophy is like this. If you want a well-ordered mind, you might need to take apart the things that are already in your mind.
This requires courage and endurance. Sometimes, it is terrifying; sometimes, it feels terrible; and your project will not be completed overnight. You may find your mind in a messy, disordered state for an extended time while you deconstruct and rebuild.
In the meantime, you must trust that you will have a well-ordered mind if you keep working with integrity and don’t quit. You must trust that you will not be in this disordered mental state forever. You must trust that there is truth, and that the truth is orderly. You do not need to force order. You simply need to pursue truth. As you pursue truth, you will eventually find order as a natural consequence – but it takes time, and first it may take significant deconstruction. You may have built significant parts of your life on top of things that you now must deconstruct. Deconstructing the foundation threatens everything you have built on that foundation, and you might treasure the things you have built on top of your old foundation. You must trust that everything you have built on truth will return to you. You must trust that everything that is not returned to you will be replaced by something better. This is faith. You cannot know for sure. The only way to know for sure is to do it.
This never really stops. Since reality exceeds comprehension, submitting to the truth means accepting that your conceptions will always be disrupted - and there is no way to anticipate which conception will be disrupted next or how much it will be disrupted. All you can do is accept the little death and resurrection whenever it comes, get it over with, and fully complete the transformation so that you can stand on more solid ground. If you do this for a long time, and if you do it constantly, then the corrections become generally less dramatic and disruptive. Deconstructing and reconstructing becomes a constant part of your life as you grow in truth.