DAM, I think you misunderstood what is meant by the inner man. The outer man refers to our personality or the patterns and habits we acquire in life.
The inner man refers to qualities we are born with. It doesn't mean what some new agers say about flying round Saturn. Society conditions and indoctrinates to react in accordance with subjective concepts of ethics. Conditioning is what inhibits the inner man from growing to reflect the essential need for meaning.
Read the beginning of Inner Empiricism. You are not the only one with sincere questions. Such people rise beyond egoistical argument.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Needle ... Dknowledge.
A friend of mine told me recently that all his life he had been interested in the meaning of things and, naturally, that led him to a study of philosophy. What he found there, he said, was one of the greatest disappointments of his life. Instead of tackling the exciting questions, most philosophers seemed to be snared in the problems of dissecting language, and probing the nuances of grammar and semiarbitrary logic. There was no vitality in this work; it was all dry academic, intellectual gamesmanship. He was looking for philosophers who, as he said, "really care about reality"; who would apply their philosophical training to help cut through the intellectual morass, clarify methodologies, and get back to the relationship between reality and experience. He very kindly described me as one of those philosophers who "really cares about reality".
As it happens, I believe there is a growing number of younger philosophers who are interested in getting to the heart of the matter--about what we mean by "reality" and the central role of experience. What draws them, and what originally drew me, to the whole area of philosophy is a quest for meaning. I discovered that the mind by itself cannot complete the philosophic quest. As Kant decisively argued, the mind can ask questions the mind alone cannot answer. For me, this is where the juice of real philosophical investigation begins to flow. I believe it is precisely where intellect hits its limits that the important questions of philosophy start to come alive.
Mainstream academic philosophy has for a long time tried to answer these fundamental questions with that part of the mind we call intellect. Frequently the difficulties encountered were so great, the logical tangles so confusing, that many philosophers decided such questions were meaningless, and some even began to ridicule anyone who dared ask "What is reality?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Is there life after death?" "What is the soul?" "Does God exist?" Yet these are the questions of the heart. These are the questions that matter most to people--not whether the syntax and deep structures of our language can ever truly represent real knowledge. The meaningful questions, these " questions of the heart", rise up in human beings because of something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.
One aspect of this is the striving to participate in a reality greater than ourselves. It is a yearning, a hunger, a force we may recognize as love. This drive is as much, if not more, a part of our nature as the sexual, physical and animal desires which psychoanalysis and mainstream psychiatry have identified as parts of our essential nature. Our drive for understanding, for participation in a higher reality, shapes our psyche as much as anything else.
But what can the mind do with this deep participatory urge? Even at its most brilliant, the intellect alone can only ask questions that skim the surface of Eros; it cannot answer these questions. Yet such questions--the meaning of life, the nature of the soul--need to be answered. If intellect is not up to the job, how can we penetrate these mysteries? The solution, I'm proposing, is that we can only extend the reach of intellect through experience. There is a certain type of experience that opens up the mind, expands our consciousness, and allows us to approach answers to many of these fundamental questions.
In this sense, as a philosopher who cares about questions of the heart, I'm essentially a student of consciousness. I'm talking about certain kinds of experiences that we have spontaneously as human beings, but which are all too uncommon and which are not valued or understood within our culture. But when they are approached from another angle, one sees that these experiences really point to an aspect of the mind, of the psyche, beyond reason and intellect. And they do more than that: They also point to the object of those experiences, that is, to a fundamental reality. These experiences present us with an alternative or complementary way of knowing the world around us as well as the world inside us. The philosophical approach I'm talking about values these "questions of the heart" as invitations to experience, as well as to cogitations of the cerebral intellect.
Appearances or Reality?
