How Formulate A Design for Living

AN increasing number of teachers of introductory philosophy and religion courses these days are using an assignment in which the student is required to state his own basic views in an organized way. Such papers are given various names, for example, "My Philosophy of Life," or "My Creed"; I personally prefer the more nearly neutral title, "My Design for Living." Whatever the title, the project itself is used because we instructors have certain assumptions about human beings. We assume, first, that every person has basic presuppositions which constitute the design being expressed in his actions. This is just as true of the first semester sophomore who--a bit proudly--bewails that he now has no faith at all, as it is of the senior partisan of "objectivity" who really thinks that he can think without presuppositions if he just tries hard enough. Second, we assume that persons had best recognize their presuppositions so that they may accept responsibility for themselves, criticize themselves, and consciously try to bring some unity to that deepest self. Third, we hold that students learn philosophy by philosophizing and theology by theologizing. Therefore we make the assignment, "Write your own design for living." And we explain that the aim of the project is to help the student to recognize his own fundamental assumptions, criticize them, and, incidentally, thereby come to understand the disciplines of theology and philosophy. Having explained the aims to the students, one might be tempted to suppose that they then could be turned loose on the task. Such procedure would be the sheerest folly, as I discovered the first time I read a sheaf of papers prepared on that basis. Certain very grave difficulties will vitiate the students' efforts. Somehow the instructor must apprize his charges of those difficulties and equip them to deal with them. This paper is written to describe such difficulties and to show some of the methods of dealing with them which I have found useful. There are three basic problems. (I shall omit consideration of such minor agonies as students' burgeoning incompetence at expressing themselves in the English language.) The first difficulty is rooted in the average beginning student's blooming confusion about the nature of beliefs. A number of symptoms typify the confusion. For example, most students assume that one's beliefs are one's professions; hence, they suppose, the best way to discover what one believes would be to listen to what one says. Another symptom is students' easy equation of belief or faith with rationalization. Faith, to these adolescents, means the tunes that the weak among them whistle as they pass the graveyard of their childhood credulity. Or, to consider the matter in the light of their so-called scientific training, faith is the foundation you have when you haven't a thing to stand on, i.e., when you are utterly without "facts." Therefore, the instructor's first task is to devise some way of showing his students that beliefs are the assumptions upon which one acts. On this view, one's faith or one's design for living is the pattern of assumptions from which one's actions spring, whether one consciously sees that pattern or not. * Chairman, Department of Religion, Denison University. Professor Larson states: "The general approach described in the paper is used in two courses I teach, the core course in Basic Philosophical and Religious Ideas and a Department of Religion offering entitled Basic Issues in Religion. Each of the courses is intended primarily for upper class students who have had no previous work in the field, although a few students each year will have had a course in the area." This paper was read at the national meeting in Evanston, Dec. 27, 1953.