15 – WHITHER HORIZONS?

November 19, 2024

“Mystery is never more than a mirage; it vanishes as soon as one tries to approach it.”

Simone de Beauvoir*

Most of what I have shared to this point comes from “ground” that is well ploughed – from years of reading and reflection.  However, as I noted two posts ago, my thoughts about “horizons” – and how they function to define the meaning of opposites - are very new, and I have worked out a few more details over the past few days.  Hence, I think it useful to return to that topic briefly.

Creation has boundaries.  “Big Bang” theorists speak of an expanding universe that has edges.  All created things have boundaries, or limits, or margins, or borders; horizon is simply a type of boundary and I think that which differentiates earth from sky is a helpful toll when speaking about external reference points of any kind.

A geographical horizon is an object.  It really exists.  It exists apart from any person and apart from the way anyone experiences.  It is a fact.  Its existence is not dependent upon the way anyone “feels” about it or subjectively experiences it.  Since the horizon is objectively real, it is in my best interest to respect it and to abide by any limits that it places upon me.

Note that a geographical horizon exists even when someone is blind.  The fact that he or she cannot see the horizon presents problems (challenges?) for a blind person, but blindness does not negate the horizon’s existence.

In the earlier post, I noted that our secular culture rejects external reference points to establish ethical standards and so traditional external reference points for right and wrong – like The Ten Commandments – are dismissed as “The Ten Suggestions.”  However, I should have gone on to note something that you presumably already know: while the objective horizon line for ethics disappears, another horizon line – a subjective horizon line – is (usually) substituted.

This is commonly known as moral relativism.  Defined in negative terms, moral relativism is the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, and, therefore, what is right or wrong may vary over time and from situation to situation and from person to person. 

Of course, moral relativism is not new.  The Book of Judges speaks to it: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judge 21:25)

Now, moral relativism rests on a contradiction – a “con” – although most people fail to see the scam (which violates the Principle of Non-Contradiction in at least two ways).  1)  Relativists deny that an objective standard for truth-telling exists and then adopt some “standard” of truth-telling based on the now non-existent standard of truth-telling.

(Thus, “to lie” has no fixed meaning to a relativist and while it does to a non-relativist, i.e. a traditionalist. Words that sound the same no longer have a common meaning and real communication breaks down. Relativists speak of truth, justice, democracy, equality, as do traditionalists, but they are speaking different languages. )

2) And the other violation is a classic self-contradictory statement: “Everything is relative” = “The one truth claim that is absolutely/objectively true is that there is no absolute/objective Truth.”  That, of course, is nonsense.  Boom! 

In the earlier post, I failed to note that moral relativists often “set up” subjective “boundaries” – that is, they “create” their own ethical horizon lines.  (It is an open question as to whether Jay Michaelson did this in the excerpt I quoted in the “Buying the Farm?” post.)  What relativists fail to see, and what we must not miss, is that, having stepped into the absurdity of subjective ethics, their so-called horizon lines are fake.  They are nonsense!  They are imaginary, a mirage, an illusion, an exercise in self-deception.  

From the perspective of Romans 1:20, this mirage of horizons is not a mystery.  As to what insight Ms. de Beauvoir was offering in her quote with which this post began, I do not know, but her words have a certain application to the topic, even if only as something that sounds profound, but makes no sense...

For next time: knowing that I have put both the objective and subjective on the table, so to speak, I want to devote the next post to explaining how the two interact.  Let’s play ball!!

*     From The Second Sex, as quoted by Pauline O’Flynn in a 2009 article/paper in “Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy.”

http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol13/de%20Beauvoir.pdf