Reading an article by John Crook* on authenticity in Zen. He says,
‘The living circumstances into which human beings are thrown have been described in terms of four main issues; finiteness, potential to act, capacity to choose, and the realisation of human aloneness.’
I was immediately struck by the similarity with the three brute facts of existence as described by O’Dea*. These are contingency, powerlessness and scarcity. O’Dea and the functionalist theory of religion are looking at the problems of human existence in an objective way. Whatever the person’s inner dispositions, these facts are, sooner or later, going to impose themselves. That is why he calls them ‘brute’. Whatever one’s beliefs in the goodness of God, however much one hopes that ‘all shall be well’, the death of a loved one still hurts. So too does the inability to do much to ease the suffering of the innocent, or the hunger of the starving. We are immersed in a reality that seems cold, impersonal and totally indifferent to our feelings.
Crook approaches the same situation in a more subjective way. We only have finite, limited understanding of ourselves and the world and such understanding as we do have is contingent upon circumstance, the availability of others, health and well being, none of which can be taken for granted and none of which are permanently available. Here the meaning of ‘contingency’ is different from that of O’Dea, who understands by it something akin to uncertainty due to dependency on factors over which we have no control. For Crook ‘contingency’ asks ‘Why?’ Why are some born with every advantage and others are disadvantaged? Why are we dependent on circumstances? Beneath these questions lurks the fear that the cosmos really is cold, impersonal and indifferent, that there is no personal God and there will be no final judgement when the inequalities will be addressed, the good rewarded and the wicked receive their deserts.
Yet we have the capacity for action and gradually realise our responsibility for action in the world. No action can be perfect so we are faced by the risk of condemnation and anxiety generated by guilt or shame. We can only act within that context. So we have to choose a path and in such choice we experience autonomy. Every action, because it affects others, requires a judgement and a decision. Therefore autonomy can never become being a law unto oneself. It must recognise that we are social beings and that it is these relationships with others that make us what we are. This is why morality lies at the heart of what it means to be a person.
Yet within that very autonomy we experience our finite limitations and may thus be faced by a sense of meaninglessness. Seeking a meaning beyond our finite worlds we may get lost and experience such emptiness as a great fear. Yet, even while we experience our lonliness we discover we are not alone. We are ‘alone with others’, as Steven Bachelor puts it. In this however there remains the threat of the disappearance of the other or withdrawal from us leaving us in total isolation. Such anxiety is terrifying and the terror genuine. The essence of being human is that we are persons. Being a person means being one pole of a relationship, many relationships – some intimate and formative, others more superficial. The cold impersonality of the cosmos is only tolerable because we have humanised our environment. In trying to answer the existential questions which nag at us we need to know whether this human environment is simply a transient epiphemenon or whether there is a personal driving force at the heart of things.
Even the most intimate and loving of relationships does not reach to the core of our being. There remains always a part that we cannot open to others, cannot share – perhaps partly because it remains mysterious even to ourselves. Similarly, however much we might love and wish to be united with another we can never reach to the core. There remains always an element of mystery, a private dimension not in their gift to reveal. We long to be known, to be loved and possessed utterly, just as we long to know and possess, so that the inner emptiness might be filled.
*[John Crook; Authenticity and the Practice of Zen, in Pickering J. (ed.); The Authority of Experience, Curzon Press, Richmond, 1997
O’Dea, Thomas F.; The Sociology of Religion, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1966 p. 5]