Phronema

I am groping about here trying to conceptualise a very vague idea, but one that I believe is fundamentally important. There seems to be a deeply ingrained feeling that human nature is fundamentally flawed – with Christians it is the Original Sin syndrome, for Hindus and Buddhists it is due to ignorance of the true nature of things. There is something wrong – with me, with others, with life in general. Happiness, equanimity, peace are attainable only for fleeting hours or days. Good times are constructed on the thin ice of an impersonal and indifferent reality. The three brute facts of existence are an ever-present backdrop to everything we do but they do not fully explain the negative bent of our existence. They do not explain, for example, why relatively poor people are often happier and more content than those who are wealthy with their greater ability to insulate themselves from the three brute facts. Our expectations always exceed our grasp and what we do manage to grab hold of never lives up to expectations. This almost permanent state of discontent is not helped by our living in a consumer oriented environment awash with advertising. 

The trouble is we are too complex. Unlike animals, who have no choice but to be what they are, we come with no blueprint other than that imposed by the culture into which we are born, a culture which no longer has a firm grip on us, living as we do in a pluralist global village with instant communication. The various cultures vie with one another, seeking the political and economic advantages which dominance brings. We are besieged by self-appointed gurus marketing their recipes for personal happiness and fulfilment – hedonism, enneagrams, aroma therapy, meditation, magic, born again fundamentalism, crystals, pyramids, tarot cards, etc., etc. The list is endless. How is one to choose? What guides are there? 

The comforting religious worldview has been superseded by that of science. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.  He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.  The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water.  Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena … their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.” William James 

The response to all this, I think, is not to be found in books, or in rational arguments, but within. We need to stop. We need to be still. We need to listen to the silence. As Thomas Merton put it –

Be still

Listen to the stones of the wall

Be silent, they try

To speak your

Name.

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you?  Whose

Silence are you?

To understand what it means to be human we need to understand how the process begins, how it develops and where it leads. The beginning is important. There is a life process – call it élan vital, or something else, it doesn’t matter – constantly giving rise to new life. Often, and I suppose ideally this always ought to be the case, this beginning is the result of the love of two people for each other. Love begets love. Even if love is not involved, but lust say, the burgeoning of life (and this includes all life, not just human) is the result of a powerful and irresistible process. The loving generation of life particularises and personalises this process. This is the apex of the pyramid of life. (I must try to avoid the use of static metaphors when talking about life.) It is the blossoming of the process. The tree of life grows, diversifies into a myriad branches and then flowers. In us the cosmological process becomes self-conscious. For us the most profound depths of meaning, significance, salience are experienced through love. There is an intuition, sometimes explicitly realised in religious experience, that love is the source from which everything flows.

But usually we do not see life like this – neither as emerging from, nor integrated with a dynamic process. Instead of seeing life like the fluid movement of a movie we see it as a slide-show, each frame succeeding the next. Some frames flash by quickly, some slowly. We want to prolong the happy, beautiful frames. If we could sometimes we would hold back movement on to the next and when the next frame does come we look back regretfully at the past. Sartre had a point when he distinguished between authentic and inauthentic existence. Inauthentic is like tobogganing downhill. You sit back and let gravity and the shape of the land determine your course. Authentic is like skiing. Balanced on the cusp of the present moment you project yourself forward, able to speed up, slow down swerve, jump and change direction. Attention is focused, not on the static this-moment-now but on directing this moment to the next. When people like de Caussade talk about the sacrament of the present moment they mean seeing the present moment as a skier sees a ski – a dynamic point of contact with reality, a springboard, a fulcrum. The present is not something passively to be endured.

Our problem is that unlike good skiers we tend either to be blindfolded or very short-sighted. Usually we cannot see what lies ahead so that instead of moving gracefully we grope our way forward hesitantly and reluctantly; we cling to the good moments and fear the unknown ahead. This is as far as the skiing analogy gets us for we will never be able to see the whole ski slope, much less the surrounding mountains and forests. We know, if we pause to work it out, that we are caught up in a process but we do not understand what it is, or why it is, or where it leads. This is why for Sartre life seemed absurd. To drift, to allow oneself to be carried along by life’s flow, inauthentic existence, was a betrayal of one’s humanity because as autonomous individuals we have the power, by acting decisively in the present moment, to shape the direction of our lives. On the other hand what was the use of this power if there is no where to go, no goal, no purpose. Sooner or later the stream of life will be reduced to a trickle and run into the sand.

This, of course, is where the religious intuition comes in. Gerard Manley Hopkins has put it better than I ever could.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil 

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 

And wears man’s smudge & shares man’s smell: the soil 

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent; 

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

And though the last lights off the black West went 

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

A starting point.

1. Take the perspective of approaching death and a retrospective look back on ones life – many incidents, which at the time seemed so important, so necessary for happiness, or success, or whatever, are not now important. You come to realise that only now is important. They were important then, but time has diminished them, given them a new perspective. If they have any importance now it is only because their effects have carried through to this now. 

This is a vast topic. From one point of view only the now is real. The past does not exist, nor does the future. Then again the past is all around us and shapes and structures our lives by the buildings, towns, cities, laws and customs previous generations have left us. The future is real in the sense that our actions and decisions of today shape it and will determine the lives of future generations. But generally we do not think too much about the past – it is accepted unquestioned, nor do we concern ourselves with anything other than the immediate future -– the next few days or weeks. The now is what is important. If it is good we want time to stand and will resist change. If it is bad we want to change it. I remember finding an old photo in a book. It was of a strikingly beautiful young woman. Judging by the clothes she was wearing it must have been taken in the 1920’s. She was smiling, her eyes bright and alive. I wondered who she was looking at and what her life had been like. I realised with a pang how ephemeral youth and beauty are. By now if she is not dead she is very old, haggard and bent, her life painful and the future dark. Life is a process but we do not look at it as such. We tend to see it as a series of frames – good times and bad times. Looking at old photos is always a slightly painful experience because those particular good times are over and will never come again. We want the good times to stand still. We want the bad times to change into good. If we had control over our lives like a video we would slow down or freeze the good times and fast-forward the bad. We moan that youth is wasted on the young.

So looking back on life from the perspective of the ‘crabbit old lady’ in the poem we ask what is the point of living, striving, achieving goals which seem so important, so all-encompassing at the time but which quickly fade, lose their lustre and are superseded by other equally transitory goals – panta rei, as the Greek philosopher said. Everything flows, nothing is fixed, or determined, or permanent.

2. This scenario is bearable if you are a classical dualist – if you believe that to be human is to have a body and a soul, that the body belongs to the material world of constant change and impermanency and that the soul is immortal. The soul perdures through all the changes of the body and, when the body dies, leaves this material domain and ascends to Heaven where it will be united with a spiritual body on the last day. This bodily existence now can be seen as a temporary inconvenience which has to be endured before we can enjoy eternal bliss.

The problem with this scenario is that it does not fit my experience. I am not normally aware of being two – a body and a soul. Where will I be when my body is in the grave and my soul is in Heaven? I cannot say, ‘I have a body and I have a soul.’ I am a living body. My body hurts, I hurt – my body experiences pleasure, I enjoy. And yet, I am not just my body. I am more than my body. I can imagine losing an arm, a leg, another arm, hair, eyes, teeth but the ‘I’ which does the imagining is undiminished. In fact I can imagine being bodiless. Out of the body experiences are not uncommon. In Near Death Experiences people have looked down on their bodies as though they had become detached from them. Is this then what ‘soul’ means? Is the soul the ‘I’, the person which experiences. I am a living body and yet I am more than my body. Is the soul this ‘more’, this detachable-from-the-body ‘I’?

3. Let’s have a look at this ‘I’. There are two possible questions. ‘What am I?’ and ‘Who am I?’ The ‘what’ is a general question and applies to all, the ‘who’ is a particular question and applies only to me. Mead distinguishes between ‘I’ and ‘me’. He distinguishes between the social self – ‘me’ and the subjective self – ‘I’. Whitehead does likewise and sees the self as a process continually projecting itself into the future.

There are no fixed, stable, permanent entities. Whatever exists is a nexus of relationships – from the cosmos itself to elementary particles. That goes for us humans too. Our bodies are a relationship of a variety of cells, which in turn are composed of molecules, etc. My identity, my sense of self is determined by the relationships which make me who I am – husband, father, colleague, consumer etc. Contrary to appearances there is nothing which exists in and of itself. All these relationships are dynamic, not static, reciprocal, not one sided. They are in process. Looking back we can see that this process has been evolutionary. Life has evolved from the elements expelled from exploding stars. Sentience emerged, then consciousness and finally self-awareness. In us the cosmos is aware of itself. All this is awe-inspiring stuff. We can see where we have come from but we do not know where the process is leading – if it is leading anywhere. Some would suggest that all is simply the result of random flux within chaos; that there is no destiny, eternal or otherwise, apart from extinction according to the law of entropy. If this is true then life is absurd and there is no meaning, no value. However, this does not reflect our deepest feelings, nor our sense of order and what ought to be.

So far we have been dealing with ‘What am I?’, the easier question to answer. What I am is a sentient organism, aware of itself, an agent with a certain amount of autonomy. ‘What’ is a pragmatic question answered by showing how I fit various categories. ‘Who’ can also be answered in a pragmatic way but the
n it really becomes a ‘which’ question. Which person am I? Which town, country etc. do I come from? ‘Who’ as a personal question is much more difficult. ‘Who’ is asked by a person of another person. It is often answered in a ‘what’, or a ‘which’ way. To seek a personal answer is to go right to the heart of what it means to be human. This is clearly seen on that occasion in the Gospels when people asked who Jesus was. ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son, etc. These are ‘which’ answers and do not touch the mystery of which they had become aware and which led them to ask the question.

‘Who’ is asked from within a relationship, person to person.

‘Who’ is a recognition of the multiple relationships of the other.

‘Who’ is a query about one’s relationship to the other. ‘Who are you for me?’

‘Who’ is a question about meaning and significance. It probes the future. What will be the impact of you on me, of I on you?

Ultimately, ‘Who am I?’ must be asked in the face of the death of self – either actual physical death, or spiritual. Who remains when all relationships are on the point of termination and the solitary ‘I’ faces absolute darkness? Whether this is the darkness of oblivion and dissolution, or of transcendence and resurrection is not known. Ultimately ‘Who am I?’ must be shouted out in the vast, dark silence where there are no human echoes, only emptiness. All I possess in the empty darkness is hope. I am reminded of a poem by R. S. THomas which says it all much better than I ever could.

 

Why no! I never thought other than 

That God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to 

Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars. His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm. We look at people

And places as though he had looked

At them, too; but miss the reflection.