I.
In the face of reality’s complexity, especially the complexity represented by the existence of other people, there are certain essential questions which I believe that all humans confront (if they live long enough and are mentally lucid) whether they realize it or not. Taken together, the search for answers to these questions forms what I call the existential dilemma of the human being. These are the questions which must be answered if a human wants to make sense of the world and survive within it. This dilemma may not be consciously articulated, but I am convinced that it is at least felt, and is perhaps the source of the vague unease many humans feel at odd times in their lives I am convinced that many humans embrace religious convictions because religion seems to end this search. Other humans seek resolution of these issues from sources outside of religion, chiefly philosophy. And many people come to believe that there are no definitive answers to any of these questions. (That lack of answers carries its own consequences, as we will see.)
In my opinion, the major existential questions humans want answers to are the following:
- What am I?
- Who am I?
- What is the world and how did it come to be?
- Why do humans exist?
- What is my place in the world?
- How should I live my life
- Can I know myself?
- Can I know others?
- Can others know me?
- Who can I trust, and to what degree?
- How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world?
- Is there a larger purpose to life than mere survival, and if so, what is it?
- What is right and what is wrong?
- What is true and what is false?
- Why is there suffering?
- Why do evil and injustice exist?
- Is life worth living?
- Is there such a thing as meaning, and if so, is it discoverable?
- What happens when people die?
Naturally, most people don’t consciously dwell on such matters very often, if at all. For the vast majority of us the demands of everyday life are such that there is very little mental or physical energy left for such “idle speculation”. And yet, I suspect that these are the questions, even if unspoken or not contemplated, around which humans build their lives and about which they are most concerned. In my view, whether they know it or not, I believe most humans both want and need answers to these questions, ones that will help them reject a conclusion that for most people is utterly intolerable, namely, that existence is absurd and nothing ultimately means anything—including our own lives.
II.
Upon birth, we must suppose that an infant faces a physical reality which is totally incomprehensible to him or her. Instinctive reactions, born of evolution’s long history, govern a baby’s behavior. As the neurons of the brain interweave themselves and make connections (while pruning back others), the earliest self-awareness an infant/toddler has begins to emerge. An “I” is beginning to take shape, the sense of being an object differentiated from other objects, a feeling of being connected by the senses to the outside world. So the initial existential question we face is, in my view, What am I? Children tend to quickly learn some variation of an answer to this question: I am a baby, I am baby boy or baby girl, I am something which belongs to mommy or daddy, I am someone who has needs. Young children just learning to speak are often excited to see other very young children, and will often exclaim, “Baby!”, upon seeing them. This recognition of others is a crucial part of personality formation and categorization. There are big people; there are little people. The earliest memories, usually from around the age of 3, indicate (in my view) a stage in the development of the self, and a new step toward defining the “What am I” question. All throughout life, as roles are acquired and membership in various groups is understood, and assimilated into a person’s consciousness, the answers to What am I grow increasingly elaborate and complex. All sorts of categories now seem applicable: member of a family, member of a neighborhood, member of a school, member of a town, member of a nation, and so on. The answers to the question “What am I” form crucial aspects of an individual’s identity. By identity, I mean the association of the “I”, the self, with various definitions which seem to be congruent with experience. “What am I” continues to be asked (either consciously or unconsciously) all through life. Answers can include, “a child”, “a teenager”, “an adult”, “an employee”, “an old person”, and, if there is sufficient lucidity near the end of one’s life, “a dying person”. In a sense, What am I is the ultimate, primal, permanent question of life, one that follows us from birth all the way to the moment of death.
Who am I? is a variation on What am I?. The various definitions associated with the self, combined with an individual’s unique experiences and genetic predispositions, form a biographical narrative in a human brain (assuming the person in question is of adequate intelligence). This narrative is strengthened by the possession of a name, a ready identifier which becomes indelibly linked to us. We say, in various ways, “I am [name]. I have a story that is mine alone. I have my own set of characteristics and ways of seeing the world. No one else is me. I live inside of myself, and I know my story better than anyone. Things have happened to me. I have done things. I have thought and felt things. I will be me for the rest of my life.” An individual human might change the definition of Who am I several times over a lifetime. And some people never quite get a handle on it. The answers to the question, Who am I can be vague, somewhat shapeless, indefinite, and malleable, as a human’s life unfolds and follows often unexpected paths. Answers to this fundamental existential question can change under the pressures of new circumstances, dramatic personal events (especially crises), and new, age-related perspectives.
As a person more and more coherently defines himself or herself as a kind of living being existing in a definite kind of world, questions tend to arise about the nature of that world and how humans came to be in it. The overwhelming majority of humans are taught answers to these questions by the adults in their culture, adults who have absorbed cultural traditions that are centuries or even millennia old. The dominant mythology of a given society is usually learned at a young age, and it can be remarkably difficult to dislodge from a person’s consciousness. The root of this difficulty, many times, is the fact that this mythology has been imparted by respected and beloved elders. Further, this mythology is generally learned when the brain is at or near its peak ability to learn. Mythology is also tenacious because of its strong emotional components, especially ones which exalt the group of which a child is a part. Cognitive dissonance can occur when cherished mythology is exposed to empirically-based scrutiny, and the mythology’s contradictions, illogical aspects, and general explanatory flaws are exposed.
The questions of what the world is, how it came to be, and how humans came to be form the core of a human’s mental picture of himself in relation to the Universe, and his relationship to a hypothesized Divine Creator (or creative force) who is ultimately believed to be responsible for bringing that Universe, and by extension the human himself, into existence. The answers embraced by a human to this set of questions tell us, in many ways, a person’s opinion of herself and the others with whom she lives. Many humans prefer answers to these questions that tend to reaffirm their sense of being important in the scheme of things. It is this comforting belief in human centrality that is most brutally challenged by the facts of our utter spatial and temporal insignificance.
III.
When a human asks, What is my place in the world?, he or she is quite possibly asking one of several things, or perhaps several things in combination. The person may be asking, “What is my rank or social standing compared to others?” This is a question of great importance, especially if a human comes to believe that his or her rank or social standing is unchangeable. A person born into a “low status” family may come to develop a fatalistic view of human life and human opportunity, seeing himself as doomed to a life of menial labor and hardship. A person born into a “high status” family may come to develop a sense of entitlement and a feeling of superiority over those who are “lesser” than she. In a sense, when we ask about our social rank we are asking, “How important and powerful am I compared to other people?” (In societies with some degree of social mobility, the desire of many to be more important and more powerful can have major consequences.) What is my place in the world, therefore, is in one way an inquiry into the possibilities of one’s life
Another answer to What is my place in the world ? can be a human’s belief about what he or she should do for a living or contribute generally to society. In other words, it’s really the question, “What should I do?” Some people come to see themselves as possessors of greatness, those tagged by “Fate” to do memorable things and accumulate great wealth. For others, “What should I do” is a question they never really answer completely, drifting through the years with no definite course. And for most, “What should I do” is answered by accepting the advice, norms, training, education, and sometimes compulsion offered or imposed by others. Many people are never given any choice at all, and do only that which others choose for them.
Finally, What is my place in the world? can be a more abstract question related to other existential questions about the meanings of life and existence. A person may also be asking, “Where do I fit in the history of the world? How did I come to be in this situation at this place and time?” The answers a person gives to these variations of the basic question are heavily dependent on his or her level of learning and the cultural narratives he or she has been raised with.
How should I live my life? involves not just questions of social standing, but also an individual’s value system and personal philosophy. The most fundamental answer is, “through right living”, but the definition of right living can vary greatly from person to person. Is right living the steady and monomaniacal accumulation of power over others, the constant seeking of advantage, and the immediate gratification of all desires, regardless of the consequences to others? Right living to other people means a code of behavior to be followed, a disciplined way life, one replete with rules of conduct toward others, a life of duties and obligations. To others right living implies an effort to experience all that can be experienced while respecting the rights of others to engage in the same pursuit. There are myriad ways right living can be understood, therefore. Moreover, the definitions of right living may not have clear-cut boundaries, can shift dramatically, and can be improvised throughout a person’s life in the absence of an elaborately thought-out value system. In many ways, human history has been affected by the clash of answers to the question, “How should I live?” Many are not content to decide this for themselves—they seek to impose their answers on others out of the conviction that they, and they alone, know the proper course.
IV.
In the face of our isolation within the physical Universe, we take comfort, perhaps, in the idea that we on this tiny planet at least have each other. But as we struggle to make ourselves understood, as we wrestle with our own natures, and as we struggle to understand others, we may find ourselves increasingly unsure of the degree to which we actually do have each other. We therefore ask the following urgent questions: Can I know myself? Can I know others? Can others know me? The answers are ones we usually don’t want to accept.
It takes many years for the typical human to understand, both emotionally and intellectually, that he or she sees the world in a way unlike that of any other human. When we are children, we simply assume, I believe, that everyone sees what we see and feels what we feel. (It could be said that when we are very young children we are so absorbed in our own reaction to the world that we simply don’t care what anyone else feels.) The different reactions of people to the events of life are puzzling when we are young, even disturbing to us. How can you feel that way? How can you not agree with me?
But as we get older, we usually find the nature of our interactions growing more complex. More and more subtle misunderstandings arise. Other people often confuse us or anger us with their seemingly inexplicable behaviors. A conclusion usually becomes more and more inescapable to us: no one can possibly know the interior mental world of another human being, and, by inference, no other human can really know ours. Of course, from our youngest moments, most of us have been spoken to and immersed in the ocean of a particular language. We have been taught to communicate with others using this medium in the hope that we could convey our internal experience to others. But the inadequacies of language—its ambiguity, its imprecision, its frequently abstract nature, its infinite shades of meaning—impede our ability to convey meaning to each other. Gradually, if we force ourselves to look at it honestly, we come to realize that no one will ever truly understand 100% of what we mean. We come to realize that even we don’t always know what we mean, as we so often try to find words for feelings that no words can express. This realization manifests itself sometimes as resentment, sometimes as sorrow, sometimes as amused resignation, sometimes as a sort of cosmic indifference. In many of us, it creates a sense of existential loneliness, and an unbridgeable isolation from other people. And there is more.
When we are in quiet moments, we often cannot get a handle on what we are experiencing at the eternal present. When we fall into the infinity of mirrors that is the attempt by the brain to understand the brain, it often produces a sense of indescribable mystification. We are reduced to thinking, “What is all this? What is experience itself?” Our brains’ inherent inability to grasp the whole reality that surrounds us strikes us at these moments, even if we don’t put the sense of how strange we feel into any words. We are simply swallowed up by our own minds, which are the product of a lifetime of sensations and interactions that have had effects on us that are simply too complicated for us to grasp. Not only are our reactions to experience too complex to sort out, these reactions are based on information about ourselves that oftentimes we just don’t have any more. We often don’t have any idea of what the root of a specific emotional response actually is. We have lost the thread of our lives, and it cannot be located again.
It is at these moments that an even darker realization occurs to us: since we can not convey total, unfiltered meaning to each other, and since we cannot account for all the many conflicting and competing emotions within us, we not only will never understand others, we will never really understand ourselves. If we dwell on this, the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves crashes down on us. We will never know others; others will never know us; we will never know ourselves. And yet, here we all are, thrown together, having to live with each other and interact with each other. It is as if the entire human population is a set of inmates, each one a prisoner in his or her own skull, trying to grasp enough of the world to survive in it (or, hopefully, prosper), and trying to communicate with the other prisoners trapped inside of their skulls. It is in communication that our only hope of lessening our sense of isolation, and hence our existential loneliness, lies.
Communication is the basis of human interaction and in a very real sense, of human survival. Humans must convey part of their internal experience to others, right from the start of life, and must in turn attempt to apprehend part of the internal experience of others. But as I said above, such communication will always be approximate. (The more abstract and less concrete the concepts used in communication, the more approximate this communication will be.) I will examine the significant impediments to communication in more detail in another essay.
Our only hope of understanding anything about each other is in the possession of common ground. If I refer to something as being red, only your visual experience of a red object will suffice for you to grasp my meaning. (The mathematical formulae describing red as a wavelength will not suffice if you have never seen a red object.) If I tell you something is hot, only your tactile experience of a hot object will stir any degree of understanding in you. (And your associations with the words red and hot may be very, very different from mine.) At a minimum, we need some sort of linguistic and/or gestural common ground to grasp part of each other’s meaning. We need a store of common experience and common points of reference, a certain amount of shared information and shared skills (which is why education of some form is indispensable to people). But we will have to accept the fact that since it is logically impossible to be another person, and to have the whole set of that person’s knowledge, experience, emotional state, and state of consciousness at our disposal at a given moment of communication, we will never entirely tear down the walls of isolation. We will perceive reality in a way which may be very similar to others, but it can never, by definition, be exactly the perception of any other person. (The upshot of all this is if I’m right, I can’t be 100% certain why I feel the need to express this to you. And you can’t be 100% certain you know what I mean.)
Are the ambiguous nature of communication, our resulting sense of existential loneliness, and the unanswered mysteries of our own personalities the real origins of our quest for certainty? Are they the sources of our desire to believe that we understand, and the illusion that we are understood? Do the huge questions most of us feel are so important about God, death, suffering, the meaning of existence, the nature of truth, and others like them have their root in our sense of isolation? Does this feeling of being isolated engender in us the desire, ultimately, to be connected with a reality where the self can be subsumed into a greater and more significant whole and language has a single, definite meaning? Can it even give us the desire to live in a reality where words no longer matter?
V.
Many people find out about human cruelty and perversity far too early in life, and any hope these people have of being able to count on and be reassured by the behavior of others is critically damaged, often irreparably so, by trauma suffered in childhood. Most others are more fortunate, but sooner or later, everyone is exposed to the sins and weaknesses that our complex psychologies give rise to: corruption, lies, betrayal, and injuries in endless variety. Since humans must be able to predict and anticipate the behavior of others for their own safety (and indeed this is so crucial that some researchers believe consciousness itself arose out of this need), the question, Who can I trust, and to what degree? is of the utmost importance. It’s worth looking at what we mean by the word “trust”.
Trust can be thought of as the willingness to let our defenses down—to be vulnerable, either physically or emotionally, or both—with another human or group of humans. This willingness to be vulnerable is based on an assessment of the predictability of other people’s behavior. If, in a particular setting, we feel that those who are present with us mean us no harm (at minimum), are positively inclined toward us (in a middle case), or would sacrifice important things to defend us (the maximum case), there is a feeling of trust. If I know that you are not going to try to hurt me, and will in fact be my ally, I can set aside my internal readiness to fight or flee, and relax emotionally.
There are, obviously degrees of trust between people, ranging from trust in a person in a limited setting for a limited duration all the way to people one can trust with one’s life. Knowing the difference between those we can trust with small things and those we can trust with the ultimate things is of obvious evolutionary importance. It is trust of an unspoken kind that regulates much of ordinary human behavior, and in situations where trust between people is low or completely absent, anarchy and “the war of all against all” tends to be the rule.
Is betrayal so sharply felt because the need for trust is so deeply embedded in our brains? There seems to be something fundamental about betrayal that causes humans to respond to it with deep anger and hurt. Is this an indication of how ancient the need for trust really is?
We see the suffering of others; we experience suffering, perhaps very severe, ourselves. We can imagine injury and pain from experience, and if we are rational (and not under the stress of life-or-death circumstances) we seek to avoid them at all costs. We especially seek to protect our children from them, very often at the price of our own well-being. We hear of or even witness horrors; dark fears insinuate themselves into our thinking, and one of the most elemental of all questions demands our attention: How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? I say “the world” in this formulation because many of our fears are centered in the generalized “others” who share the world with us, the strangers who may do us harm. (The issue of trust is at play here, of course.) We seek to give ourselves and those we love safe places in which to live, and we seek further to control as many of the potentially dangerous variables in our environment as we can. The inability to control these variables can lead to a feeling of helplessness, rage, frustration, despair, and chronic fear. People trapped in war zones or in generally lawless areas know the terrible urgency of finding safety, in many ways the prime objective of a living thing. The fear, caution, preparation, and alertness demanded by the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe has been one of the chief factors driving human history. Magnified over an entire population, the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe is at the heart of our defense efforts (although the individual soldier may be fighting under compulsion).
The issue of protecting one’s self and one’s loved ones is so significant that it is usually the priority consideration in a person’s life. The quest for security and the need to prepare for dangers which may emerge either from malicious strangers or unpredictable nature can lead to the sacrifice of all other values. Conversely, the failure to protect one’s loved ones (or the perceived failure) can lead a human down the most grievous abysses of despair. The protection of one’s kin, in particular, may have extremely ancient evolutionary roots; only the survival of the precious genes guarantees continuation of our line. The anguish we feel when those we love have been harmed may in part be rooted in this. Add in the depths of emotional attachment that people usually feel for those related to them, and the suffering of our loved ones becomes utterly intolerable, a fate to be avoided at any cost, including the abandonment of even the most deeply held moral beliefs. How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? For most people, the answer is, “Any way I have to.”
Survival may be a tremendous achievement for many people, and the minimal protection of themselves and their loved ones a true victory, given the often harsh realities of the world. But most people, at least in the more economically advanced areas of the Earth, seek something more once the basic minimums of life have been secured. Specifically, most people want to know the purpose of the human enterprise itself. They want to know, “Is there a larger purpose to life than mere survival, and if so, what is it?” This question is related to “How should I live my life?” but it is not identical to it. It contains the unspoken question, “Why do we live?” It also encompasses more than just one’s self, for it implies that humans as a group have some sort of mission to fulfill, and that this mission is both significant and discoverable. The answers people give to this question very often reveal deeply held personal beliefs or prejudices. A person might say that the purpose of life is to prepare for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, or that the purpose of life is to prepare for Eternity, or the purpose of life is to eradicate human suffering, or the purpose of life is to grab everything for yourself that you can before you die or the purpose of life is to have children and grandchildren and pass one’s family name down. Others might say in response to this question, “Purpose? There is no such thing. We just live and do the best we can, and then we die.” That statement very often also reveals deeply held beliefs, although most people might not readily perceive this. However it is answered, one thing is consistent: if a purpose is believed to exist, it is considered the main overall reason a person lives his or her life. It is the ultimate, overriding goal. It is, in essence, the root of a personal philosophy.
VI.
At a young age, most people begin to be given what will turn out to be a long series of instructions on what to do and what not to do. They will have these rules impressed into them in any number of ways, many of them physically hurtful ones. Also at a young age people will begin to glean lessons from the culture with which they are surrounded about what constitutes “right conduct”. As a person grows older, he or she will generally begin making judgments about the behavior of others, perhaps comparing it to the standards of behavior which they have absorbed (in their uniquely individual way) from their kinship group, neighbors, and community. Whether they realize it or not, when they do this, most people are applying a set of standards that govern a general system by which the behavior of others is regulated (and by which their own behavior is in turn regulated). They are forming answers to the question, “What is right and what is wrong?”
This question is, naturally, at the very heart of what humans call their moral or ethical systems, and it has been answered in any number of ways. Wrong conduct, being abnormal and disruptive, seems to be identified more readily than right conduct, which tends to become part of the human mental background, part of the definition of “normality”. Among the definitions of wrong conduct humans have given over the centuries, the following tend to be the most prominent:
• Whatever violates the sacred teachings of the religion which is
dominant in our culture.
• Whatever disrupts the orderly conduct of business and social
relationships in our society.
• Whatever undermines the unity of our people.
• Whatever shows disloyalty to the rulers of our society.
• Whatever violates the prerogatives of parents over their
children.
• Whatever brings dishonor to and condemnation of a family.
• Whatever violates the person or property of a human being who has
committed no offense against anyone.
• Whatever undermines the trust people in our society have to have
in order to live with each other.
• Whatever is, in general, contrary to the laws, norms, and
traditions of our people.
• Whatever actions those in power take that are corrupt or unjust.
• Any combination of any of the above with varying degrees of
emphasis on the individual guidelines.
Notice that only two or three of these statements could in any way be interpreted as emphasizing the primacy of the individual or the rights of a human against the power of those who govern him. In fact, throughout human history, questions of right and wrong have seldom been left to individual judgment, nor have they focused primarily on the rights of the person. Wrong conduct has generally been defined as conduct which undermines the collective well-being of a society, conduct which attacks the institutions on which the society is based. (Right conduct, naturally, is generally considered the exact inverse of each of the above statements.) Virtually every human who has ever lived, until the last few hundred years, has lived under definitions of right or wrong behavior similar to this. Respect for the individual’s privacy and personal conduct has, in the larger context, been an aberration in human history, not the norm.
But humans face moral and ethical dilemmas of a smaller scale every day, ones for which guidelines are not always clear. How should I treat those whom I don’t know? How friendly or unfriendly should I be to those I do know? Should I always be bluntly honest, or should I value tact above all? Should I help people I don’t know, or ignore all but the needs of my own family? Can I rightfully take advantage of the ignorance or gullibility of other people? It is this mass of billions of small moral decisions that often steer the day-to-day course of our world more than the broader and more formalized rules that govern societies.
Questions of right and wrong, can, of course, be given more ominous interpretations. What is right and what is wrong? Some answers are:
• Whatever benefits me is right; whatever doesn’t benefit me is
wrong.
• Whatever promotes the power of my group is right; whatever
lessens it is wrong.
• Whatever hurts the people I hate is right; whatever doesn’t hurt
the people I hate is wrong.
The terrible simplicity of such answers has very often been the basis for the most obscene crimes and atrocities in human history. And, unfortunately, those who reduce all of life to a simple question of whether they’re getting their way or not prevail more than we would like to admit.
[Part II tomorrow night]