Agnology - a study in human ignorance

Of course, it was unstaged.

My question consists of just three words: What is sleep? I admit I did a double-take when I first found out what my topic was. Even an infant knows, right? Nothing is more natural to the human body (even the sexual drive takes a back seat to physical exhaustion). And no one has to be reminded that they should be tired. Some people long for “meaningful” sleep so desperately that the NYT reported last year that 42 million sleep prescriptions were written by doctors. And hasn’t science removed all doubt about what it does and why we need it? Well, no. It turns out that even though every person on earth spends about one-third of his or her life in a state of sleep, science is still trying to figure it out. As one medical journal says bluntly: “No one knows what sleep really is.” It’s a bit of an embarrassment, really. I even asked the NSA’s resident expert about the nature of sleep. And, no, not even Brian Schlect had an answer. Although he offered to test any hypotheses I might have.

But I had to find an answer, of course. It’s possible to take a number of different perspectives. What happens during sleep? Why do we sleep? And, What does sleep mean to us?

Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and the Kingdom of God

The modern impulse is a matronly one. From the first spark of the Enlightenment project, the modernist had the aim of cleaning up the mess which had been created by the untidy medievals. Descartes in his Discourse on Method begins by posing the question: if all men possess reason, why do we end up in disagreement on so many issues—often to the point of bloodshed? The ethical application of the modern quest for universal agreement is centered on the principle that “reason,” rather than external authority, provides mankind with the means to achieve order. And, further, it is possible to establish a internal “law” which would have all men treat all men with equity. The medievals had imposed the threat of ecclesial judgment on men in order to force them into line with divine law. For the moderns, however, this external threat reeked of arbitrary violence; surely there must be a more rational way to establish a universal law than to fall back on ecclesial powers which allegedly derived their authority from a Being not bound by law. For the modern, any law of ethics must be based in human autonomy, centered in the self. Immanuel Kant, following in this stream of thought, proposed his own modern Golden Rule—one which is ultimately impersonal, autonomous, and lacking in the self-sacrificial virtue of the biblical alternative.