A Matter Of Faith
Have you ever made a significant decision? Maybe you were stuck between the college of your dreams or the college you could afford, the job that’s down the street or the job offer in a new country.
Even if your decision wasn’t as life-altering as moving out of the country, it could still fall into the category of a significant decision. Some of our choices that impact our lives the most are the ones that seem small and insignificant, such as the decision to do your homework every day or run each morning. Doing your homework and going for a run may not do anything grand for you in the immediate future, but over time their effects are immeasurable.
The man who runs each morning not only trains his body but also trains his discipline. He becomes the type of man who is likely to do the things that no one else will. He doesn’t only become the man with high endurance. He becomes a man with discipline. Once this coveted virtue is attained, he may become a CEO, a military man, or a doctor. Options that are shut off from the man who lacks discipline.
You see, his desire and will to run was at first only as a means of exercise. That is, he began the hobby to become fit and in the process received more than he bargained for, namely discipline. The act of making the right daily choices will cause their effect to accumulate into a significant result. You are thus rendering your seemingly insignificant decisions far more significant than you first imagined.
Some Objections
Now, this view of choice does create some complicated problems with all of your choices becoming significant. You have to be able to make the right choices in every circumstance. You’re no longer able to make decisions flippantly. Every choice matters and has a purpose.
The problem is, to make good choices, you will require knowledge about their cost and outcome. Their price is whatever you have to sacrifice, and their outcome being the result the choice produces. If you lack this knowledge, you cannot make an informed decision. You are thus rendering your choice flawed due to your ignorance.
Now, if every decision matters and requires exhaustive knowledge. It begs the almost unanswerable and insufferable question, How can I know enough to make a decision. We could walk a nearly infinite number of lines to try and answer this question. In response, I would think to ask a different question that might prod at the underlying assumptions, do we need to have exhaustive information to make a choice? If you didn’t need all the information to make the right choice. If it were possible to come to a position where you could make a choice reasonably but without all of the data. Then it negates the threat of the original dilemma.
I think there is a way to make choices without having all the information. This form of decision making stems from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He thought that, since it was impossible to know all of the information surrounding a topic, you would need to leap what you know to the conclusion. Kierkegaard thought that this was the case for every decision, belief, or determination. He notably employed this thought process towards religious belief.
The implications of this form of decision making are intuitive and humane, primarily because Kierkegaard builds up from what we already know about human understanding and expounds on it. We understand that the idea of a wholly rational consumer is a myth. No human possesses all of the relevant information around a decision to make an entirely reasonable choice. There will always be some unknown variables. Even for the most simple of choices and also for choices regarding your appetites.
A Demonstration of Faith
For instance, imagine going out for ice cream at a new ice cream parlor. You’ve never been there before, but you know how ice cream parlors work because you’ve been to one before. At this new parlor you may ask for Rocky Road Ice Cream, as it happens to be your usual order. It’s your usual order because you like chocolate, and it’s the only kind of chocolate ice cream offered by the shop you frequent. You didn’t order it because you know it to be the best most chocolaty ice cream out there. You made a choice out of familiarity, and since you made your choice not from the options available but your limited experience, you made a sub-optimal decision. Whereas, if you examined your option, you might find that Chocolate Turtle Ice Cream suits your desire more appropriately than Rocky Road.
If you had tried the new ice cream and knew about the flavors in the Chocolate Turtle Ice Cream, you would have picked it. You would have picked it because it would have better satisfied your craving. Since it contains more chocolate and caramel than Rocky Road, and those happen to be your favorite parts of any ice cream flavor. However, you did not possess all of the information, and you settled for a flavor you already knew about, Rocky Road. As a result, you made a less optimal choice not based off of your rationality or intellect but out of comfort and previous experience.
The point of my image is to show how we make most of our choices. We tend to make our decisions not out of our reasonableness but from our experience and familiarity. In fact, there really would be no way to employ our reason completely with any choice. Our reason can only carry us so far when it comes to making a choice. It is a rather unfortunate truth that regardless of how tirelessly we examine our decisions, we can never come to a complete understating of them, they can never be truly rational. Due to the limited nature of our intellect, there will always be deficient in our rational.
Now you have it, every choice is and must be made without possessing all the information since we can only employ our reason to part of the decision, due to our limitations. It is at this point where Kierkegaard comes into play. He would say that we must leap over the remaining parts of the choice of which we can know nothing. We should learn and seek to understand as much as we can about our options and their potential outcomes to lessen the gap of ignorance, but in the end, there will always be a gap. We can only decrease the size of the chasm and increase our odds of making it to the other side safely. The more we know, the short the distance we have to leap. This jumping over the chasm of ignorance is called a leap of faith.
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