PARISM

Growing up, I spent a lot of time wrestling with a heavy sense of meaninglessness, looking for a way to make sense of things. I could never really commit to one specific school of thought, though. Existentialism came the closest, as it gave me a way to navigate the void, but as time went on and my own perspective started taking shape, even that started to feel like it wasn't quite enough.

Because of this, I decided to fully develop my framework and coin yet another term (why not!): parism, derived from the verb to pare.

Put very simply, parism is the idea that human beings should subject their worldview to conscious and rigorous investigation, questioning the beliefs they have inherited or developed throughout their lives. This is something I began doing pretty early on, and it's become increasingly important in my life.

I guess we can start by defining what I mean by belief in this context. Belief refers to any and all fundamental elements of a person's worldview. Anything they deem as true or meaningful that helps determine who they are in the world and how they live, such as religious and metaphysical beliefs, moral and ethical values, goals and aspirations, or even conceptions of identity.

Most of these beliefs are inherited without us consciously choosing them. We're born into a family, culture, language, society, historical period, and particular circumstances, which Sartre calls our facticity. This facticity leads us to inherit assumptions before we are even capable of recognizing that we're inheriting them, and I will refer to these as our passive inheritance.

Passive inheritance is, then, anything that is given to an individual by their family, culture, society, education, or any other aspect of their facticity that they hold without having subjected it to conscious examination, leaving it in the realm of classical doxa.

This conscious examination is what I am calling paring, the main process through which parism is practiced. To pare means to examine and separate whatever exists within our worldview merely because of inheritance, conditioning, authority, habit, or convenience, until we're left only with what we are capable of consciously and authentically sustaining.

Paring means asking "why do I believe this?" and continuing to ask until the answer is no longer "because I was told" or "because that’s how it has always been," but something you can defend consciously.

No one has the time or mental energy to constantly question every belief, though. Unlike Socratic philosophy, parism doesn't demand endless interrogation or expect you to push beyond your practical limits. The goal is to examine positions as far as you reasonably consider possible, given your abilities, information, limitations, and circumstances.

I would say we should subject something to examination proportional to its perceived importance and to the reasons available for supporting it. Once certain fundamental principles have been examined, many smaller questions can be evaluated through them. The most demanding part of paring lies in the foundation, and once that foundation has been consciously established, it can serve as a lens through which derived questions are investigated.

It’s also important to note that the parist cannot determine what is important from a neutral position. Our judgment of importance is itself shaped by our experiences, facticity, and values, and it is therefore revisable. We may rely on experts, science, testimony, books, teachers, and traditions. The idea is not to discover everything alone, but to only accept what is intellectually appropriated. You can accept a conclusion if you have examined your reasons for trusting the argument in good faith.

Once subjected to investigation, not every inheritance needs to be abandoned either. One possible outcome of paring is the transformation of passive inheritance into what I'm calling conscious inheritance. A person can be born into a religious tradition, investigate that tradition through paring, and continue to belong to it. In that case, the fact that their religion was inherited does not make their position incompatible with parism. The difference is purely in the relationship they've developed with what they received.

Through the process of investigation, we may arrive at other positions that were not inherited or received from our facticity. These positions can be called conscious acquisitions, meaning those beliefs that we incorporate into our worldview as a result of reflection and deliberate choice.

To recap:

Passive inheritance: I received it and did not question it.
Conscious inheritance: I received it, questioned it, and consciously chose to keep it.
Conscious acquisition: I investigated and consciously incorporated it.

The ultimate purpose of paring is intellectual ownership. A belief only becomes truly yours when you can consciously account for its presence within your worldview, all while recognizing that the perspective from which you account for it is itself partly inherited.

To properly claim this intellectual ownership, the concept of authenticity is very important. Authenticity, particularly within existentialist traditions, states that one should consciously appropriate and own their choices and values instead of letting expectations and conventions define them. To live authentically in the parist sense also involves investigating where the reasons behind the way you live actually came from. For example, finding out that a deeply felt desire was actually shaped by values you never fully examined.

Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living. Parism is less absolute. No one is morally obligated to follow this way of thinking, but I do believe a consciously examined life is preferable. Living according to unexamined beliefs means living in Sartrean bad faith. It allows one's values, goals, and sense of identity to be passively received, which is a form of existential passivity at best, and at worst, may lead to deep internal conflicts, much like an unintegrated Jungian shadow.

However, unlike pure existentialism, which often treats relying on social roles or pre-existing traditions as a cowardly surrender of freedom, parism does not demand that you invent a worldview from scratch. You can lean on pre-existing structures, but you must do so with your eyes wide open. The main problem would be maintaining a position that you did not make enough effort to investigate.

Because of this focus on the process rather than the result, parism does not regard being wrong, by itself, as the fundamental failure. Arriving at a false conclusion after honest investigation is an epistemic error. On the other hand, arriving at a true conclusion without ever investigating why you believe it is not an intellectual achievement.

Parism does not contain an ideological conclusion. People possess different experiences, abilities, and access to evidence, so sincere investigation will not produce the same conclusion in every individual. One person may end up a collectivist, while another ends up an individualist. The legitimacy of a position depends upon its process of appropriation, not an obligation to reach a universally prescribed answer.

Paring may sometimes mean arriving at a simple "I don't know," or what is also called aporia. If a belief cannot be sustained, but no alternative can be sustained with greater confidence, remaining without an answer may be the most honest position available.

In fact, the awareness and acceptance of our ignorance is a big part of the concept. If Socratic ignorance is the conscious awareness of what you personally do not know, I'm proposing its cosmic-existential equivalent. I am calling this awareness cosmoignorance, a form of epistemic humility. This is the understanding that human beings are finite and cognitively limited beings confronting a reality whose scale and complexity may radically exceed their capacity for understanding. We do not have the cognitive hardware to declare a cosmic absolute.

Cosmoignorance is the permanent awareness that we have no right to presume the human capacity for knowledge is proportional to all that there is to be known. Kantian humility also recognizes the limits imposed on human knowledge by the conditions of our cognition, but cosmoignorance extends this into an existential awareness of our physical position as tiny parts of a reality much greater than ourselves.

Cosmoignorance serves as a permanent epistemological horizon. You can authentically and consciously embrace certain beliefs post-paring, but always with the awareness that both the investigation and the conclusions could be terribly limited by your cosmoignorance.

Ultimately, while you have no control over the circumstances you were born into, you're responsible for what you do with them once you are capable of critical thought. Parism does not promise absolute truths or a life without contradictions. Instead, it asks you to take the life and beliefs you were handed and decide to make them yours on purpose. Question what you have been taught, examine what you currently believe, and let go of whatever you cannot honestly stand behind.

It asks you to take your passive inheritances and either transform them into conscious inheritances or replace them entirely with new conscious acquisitions. And when you inevitably hit a wall just beyond your ability to understand, parism asks you to be brave enough to simply admit you do not know. You don't have to have it all figured out, but you are required to look.

According to me. And my facticity. And my cosmoignorance. :)

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