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goals which seem so important, so all-encompassing at the time but which quickly fade, lose their lustre and are superseded by other equally transitory goals – panta rei, as the Greek philosopher said.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.