Kassie, a delightfully gregarious young lady in her mid-twenties, runs a café in Sedona, a bright little spot filled with books and plants, a space clearly designed to facilitate friendly gathering and meaningful conversation. And Kassie herself is quite pleasantly eager to engage in the same.
Before my pour-over is quite ready, I’ve learned quite a bit about Kassie’s ideas about life, and when I describe the journalistic project I’m beginning, she expresses an immediate interest in being my very first interviewee.
And so we begin.
Kassie’s is far from the unexamined life. In fact, very rarely have I encountered someone with such a clearly acknowledged and articulated fundamental principle. Through the course of our conversation, her foundational commitment is expressed repeatedly in a single word: autonomy.
It was this commitment to her own autonomy that led to some friction in the timing of opening her café. It was that same commitment which for many years led her to resist external cultural pressure toward the domestic life. Until, that is, she perceived such pressure to have relaxed, at which point, she decided that the life of a wife and mother was one she now wishes to pursue, along with a graduate degree in psychology.
Kassie’s ideas about the origin of the world and life and humanity are less than completely formed; the fun, she says more than once, in considering such matters, comes in never actually being able to arrive at any definitive answers. Humans, it is true, seem to her to be more than merely material beings; she strongly feels that they have something like a soul. But she does not say, or seem even to care to know, how this all might have come about. She thinks it all could be just a happy accident. But, as becomes clear through the course of our conversation, Kassie’s lack of clear answers to these questions is not itself an accident, but is rather itself a function of her ultimate commitment to human autonomy.
For when it comes to her thoughts about human value, human purpose, and human moral responsibility, Kassie’s answers are definitive and crystal clear: There are no ultimate objective external standards for any of these. Humans define their own value. They decide their own purpose. They choose their own moral standards. Humans, in fact, determine their own reality.
While Kassie is glad that other people choose not to live as if there is no real right and wrong, and while she has been happy to adopt certain aspects of the traditional western morality with which she was raised, she is clear that these are merely personal, or at the most, societal choices, choices that have no true ultimacy.
Kassie’s undergraduate study of philosophy is where, it seems, she learned the term she expressly uses to identify the worldview she has embraced: existentialism. But it it is evident that this choice was mostly an ex post facto label that she adopted (despite her general uncomfortability with labels) to denote an approach to life with which she had already been operating from her adolescence.
It was expressly in accord with her own autonomy that she decided to undergo Christian baptism at the age of sixteen. And it was expressly in her accord with her own autonomy, two years later, that she decided to walk away from her profession of that faith. Christianity, she says she realized, if definitively true, would serve as too severe a limitation, not just on her right and ability to determine her own truth, her own purpose, and her own morality, but upon the fundamental right of all other people to do the same.
It is for this reason, she says, that she cannot say one way or the other whether Jesus of Nazareth died and rose from the dead. If she were clearly to affirm that he did not, then that would be to speak against the Christians’ choice to make this truth part of their personal reality; if she were clearly to affirm that he did, then this would speak against the choice of non-Christians to exclude it from theirs. And so, while setting aside this faith for herself, she is unwilling to go as far as to say that it is indeed false.
And this, it seems to me, is why she is also reticent to affirm any particular views about the origins of the world, or of life, or of humanity. To define an origin for any of these, to affirm, for example, that they are all the creation of the living God, that they exist by the will of another, is to necessarily constrain our freedom to define their value and purpose for ourselves. And this, for Kassie, simply will not do.
As our conversation nears its end, Kassie acknowledges that humans cannot be completely free to absolutely determine their reality. There are consequences, she concedes, that truly do follow certain decisions, consequences that cannot be merely existentially decided away. Often times, she observes, these consequences arise as a result of the societies and cultures in which we truly do find ourselves and which necessarily restrain to some degree our ability to choose our own path. Nevertheless, as far as it is possible, it is the value of human autonomy which must be upheld.
We end up not much discussing Kassie’s logical reasons for having adopted this existential commitment. This is partly because of the amount of time we spend discussing many other important matters. But, as a further reason, it seems clear to me that, for Kassie, existential autonomy is not a conclusion to which she has arrived on other logical grounds; rather, it is the single presupposition that controls nearly all of her reasoning; it is for her the axiomatic foundation by which all other truth claims are measured: Does a particular idea affirm human autonomy? Then it is valid. Does it impinge upon human autonomy? Then it should not be embraced, at least, not embraced by her.
It would not perhaps be fair, however, to represent this as the full scope of Cassie’s epistemology; that is, her approach to determining truth. For when asked why she believes in the human soul, and why she believes that the life of her deceased Christian grandfather, whom she clearly dearly loved, cannot really have been in vain, and that he must, in some sense, continue to live on even after his death—when asked about her reasons for these beliefs, her answer is very simple: it would just be too sad to believe otherwise.
Indeed, my friend, indeed it would.