Dr Brainerd Prince
One of the things that uniquely characterizes us, humans, is that we are a meaning-making creature. We have developed sophisticated ways to reflect, think and articulate our understandings of life.And yet, the everyday problems and the tragedies that occupy most of our lives rarely give us an opportunity to reflect upon life itself. I am reminded of a story told by Daniel Boyarin in the ‘Introduction’ of his book ‘Borderlines’:
‘Every day for thirty years a man drove a wheelbarrow full of sand over the Tijuana border crossing. The customs inspector dug through the sand each morning but could not discover any contraband. He remained, of course, convinced that he was dealing with a smuggler. On the day of his retirement from the service, he asked the smuggler to reveal what it was that he was smuggling and how he had been doing so. “Wheelbarrows; I've been smuggling wheelbarrows, of course.”’
The ‘wheelbarrows’ represent the big questions of life as well as the assumptions we have about their answers, which we have uncritically smuggle through life, while busying ourselves with the small things of everyday life.
We are so busy trying to ‘survive’ life that we can hardly afford the luxury of reflection and analysis and the questioning of the ‘wheelbarrows’. Furthermore, like most skills of value, reflection too is a craft that needs to be learned and mastered. Shoddy and uncritical reflection gives no gain and is worse than blindly following others without self-reflection.
However, we are woken up from this slumber, when we are faced with extraordinary experiences. If at all there is any benefit from the Covid pandemic, it is this, that our regular lives have been brutally snatched from us. In return, our busy lives have been forcefully slowed down, and we are confined to our homes. This has given us time on our hands to think and reflect.
I asked myself the question – what would be four fundamental themes that are central for human life in general, and for my own life as well? Neither was the search for these themes tedious nor were they difficult to find as the themes have always been there nearby, even if they were never fully articulated.
I was quickly able to jot down the following – Self, Other, Death, and Beyond. When I shared this with a friend, he shot back a list, which captures these ideas in a more profound manner. His list that captures my themes were – Identity, Alterity, Mortality, and Eternity.So, why these terms, rather than others? In my view, these terms point to what is primordial in human existence.
Our changed epistemological world that leans towards an existential view, can be represented well, when we flip the famous saying of Descartes and say, ‘I am, therefore I doubt, and, therefore I think’.It all begins with the existence of our self and our identity – the self that asks the questions about self. All our deliberations and the opinions that we exchange in our everyday life are guided and even led by the what lies deeper within us, like the wheelbarrow, which is rarely visible. The image of the iceberg can be used here to denote the vast domains of the self that lie beyond straightforward human perception. Who am I? What is the human self? How should we understand its identity? Perhaps here, we can also deal with questions of origin – how did the human self come to be? It would also be worthwhile looking at questions related to the self’s ability to change over time.Is it possible to even talk intelligently about a self’s passage through time, which in turn change the very nature of the self? Is the self the same, or has it changed and become different over time?
Secondly, one of the primordial observations about the self is that it never is in isolation. Some, like Emmanuel Levinas, have even argued that, the self only becomes the self at the face of the other and hence the theme of alterity, the existence of the other, and their centrality to our own existence. In simple terms, alterity refers to what is not ourselves. Although we primarily talk about other human selves, it could also refer to animals, plants and even the material universe which is an ‘other’ to us. Humans are born to humans, are raised by humans,and live, work and die amongst humans.Therefore, the question for all human selves is about how should I be with the other? How should I treat another human person? Furthermore, how should I be with an ‘other’ and treat someone who is radically different from me? Although I am a fan of the great American filmmaker, Orson Welles’, I would beg to differ with him on his understanding of the other. He writes, ‘we’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.’ The other is not an illusion. Life could be lonely, but the other is always there, besides us, behind us, and even in front of us.
Thirdly, even if we master the art of being with each other to perfection, a day will come when we will have to bid goodbye to this world. We use the term ‘death’ to denote the mortality of humans. The miracle of birth has an ending, and the self in its body dies. But, what exactly is death? What does it mean to be mortal? Is death final, so that with death, everything returns to oblivion and nothingness, or is there something more? Why is there death at all in the first place? Is death a necessity of the human condition? The principle of death and decay that accompanies the self, right from its birth – does it say something about the primordial condition of human beings and our world? If death is inevitable then why do anything at all? How should we understand death and the mortal condition of being human? Without a good grasp of the meaning of death, there is the probability of mis-living our lives. For example, we will not know how to run a race, if we do not know, in the context of the race, about the finish line – if it is after 100 meters or after 42 kilometres.
Finally, even as we think about death, we are forced to think about what lies beyond it or eternity – it naturally leads us to think about life beyond death, and perhaps even before birth. Is there anything or anyone outside the universe we humans inhabit? Is there a God who is beyond the human condition, and who is responsible for us and our universe? Is there a world beyond what is visible and experiential to us? How should we understand what lies beyond the realm of human existence? Some would say that this is all that there is and with death everything turns to nothingness. Others would claim that humans are trapped in cycles of births and deaths and the primary human objective is to break free from the cycle of life and death and get united with the ultimate consciousness. And then there are others who believe in a creator God as someone who is beyond this universe, and yet is deeply interested in us and our world. The goal of life is to live for him and in death, pass on, to live with him for eternity.
Thus, we have: Identity II Alterity II Mortality II Eternity
I believe these four themes fairly capture the human life in its entirety and therefore are of central significance in any human quest to understand life and its meaning. Beginning with the attempt to understand the identity of the self, its origin and present role, the focus moves on to how a self is to live with others and thereby grapple with engaging alterity, which will inevitably come to an end with death that reveals the condition of mortality in which we are enclosed, which finally leads us to raising the question about what lies beyond our existence, in eternity, and perhaps even raise the question of God and human faith.
One of the joys of being human is that we don’t need to immediately jump to conclusions and answers. We can ruminate over these questions and internalize them so that we are able to truly ask these questions for ourselves.
As Heidegger says this about our acts of questioning: ‘We want to be clear about this from the start: it can never be determined objectively whether anyone is asking – whether we are actually asking this question, that is, whether we are leaping, or whether we are just mouthing the words.’ Often, we can end up just mouthing these questions because we have, without rigorously thinking, already succumbed to a certain set of answers and given our allegiance to them, even before clearly understanding the questions and the possible answers. In other words, we have never really asked these big fundamental questions of life.
Summarizing Heidegger – putting our faith on answers without proper questioning is nothing but a matter of convenience that reveals indifference or even apathy rather than a genuine concern with the fundamental stuff of life. I hope we will continually reflect, ponder and think about these questions before giving our consent and allegiance to any answer, how much ever tantalizing.
