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.