Can a Single Test Determine One's Fitness under any Circumstances Continued

If the Other exists outside of human existence, exterior to existential time, then it is reasonable to ask if the Other has influence upon existential time. The simple answer is yes, but only as the Other is remembered by human beings through complex metaphorical and allegorical narratives that rest, like the Other, wholly in historical or non-responsive time. That human beings living in the limbo between two infinities have a need to recall those infinities without existential reference fills page after page with stories that attempt to explain one’s relationship with the Other, one’s reliance upon the Other if you will. But, because one cannot know the Other in any direct way, the stories fail, are often contradictory, and leave many more questions open than are ever answered.

There is not a more complex response to the question of the Other. The act of trying to remember is a response-able undertaking that is doomed from the start to fail. Human beings are story-telling creatures. According to Jerome Bruner, we tell stories to explain that which is not normative. We do not need stories to explain the norms of cultural intercourse. Stories serve the express purpose of helping us to remember that for which there is no response—that which exists outside of existential time. Within the human experience of existential time there is no need to explain the unknown, rather there is a pressing need to discover and overcome barriers to knowledge. Yet, because there is a missing piece, the infinite Other, human beings require a way to engage with that Other in a way that helps explain the why of existence.

It is clearly no accident that, as Joseph Campbell argued, storied themes flow through all of cultural narrative. Every cultural group has a sacred text that references the creation of the world as well as stories of birth, death, and resurrection. These narratives serve to acquaint one with the infinite in ways that satisfy curiosity without actual empirical knowledge. Stripped of their particulars, the stories are remarkably similar one to the other. This is no accident, claims Campbell. The explanatory stories require leaps of faith that transport one back to the time before birth or forward to the time after death by providing a glimpse of the world outside of the closed universe.