The fundamental option: Who am I, what am I going to make of me?

The title to my reflection, is in the context of a number dedicated to the theme "choose my life", refers - beyond the realm of theology or moral philosophy in which it is usually treated - to a meditation on the human condition and its exercise. But it is clear that our journal does not ask for or tolerate a purely theoretical consideration of first philosophy or philosophical anthropology. I will therefore try a meditation aimed at helping to become aware of the radical originality of our human condition and the presence in it, as the center of that originality, of a fundamental option by which we decided to exercise and take charge of our existence. As the practical orientation of reflection calls for, it will extend towards the content of that option and the extension of it in the development of our lives.

Who am I, man?

It is well known that, being the most important, the one in which we play everything, this question appears only rarely in the lives of most people. Our days are ordinarily "busy" with more immediate and seemingly more urgent and more practical questions. Some refer to the realities of the world and are meant to explain them in order to dominate them and put them at our service. They are the ones that Kant would include in the first of his questions: "What can I know?" Others already open awareness to human action and the need for justification that appears in it and direct man towards "what should I do?" The third order of questions refers to the need for global sense and last present in everything that man does, and arises in terms of "what can I expect?". But all these questions ultimately direct towards the most radical and compromising of the questions that every person is called to ask himself: what is being Human? Or, better, who am I?

It should also be noted that each of these issues arises from a certain form of exercise of existence and installation in life, and that man has the sad possibility of becoming installed in a way of living that shies away from all kinds of personal issues and limits him to being handled in a world limited to a set of technical problems , of purely pragmatic issues, in which reality comes down to its useful function and no other values appear than the pleasant and the unpleasant, the useful and the useless. However - and despite the extraordinary power of today's civilization, with its increasingly effective means of diversion to bring these disturbing questions to their consciousness, while full of promises, it is not easy for a person to shield his life to the point of preventing, at least in extraordinary circumstances, those disturbing questions from a ariseing from his conscience, while full of promises.

Generally, such questions arise when an extraordinary situation breaks the fence to which daily life, made of necessity, routine and superficiality, has us subjected. It is what the philosophers of existence identified as boundary situations, those that we do not have at all, that are imposed on us, affect us in a global and radical way, call us into question and destabilize the unconscious security in which we had settled. It may be the death of someone we love, the possibility and reality of death itself, the experience of a joy that fills us and overwhelms us and that we realize that we do not have... In the face of such situations the subject reacts with extraordinary experiences, summit-experiences (A. Maslow), meta-goals, metamotivated, that dilate one's consciousness, trigger new feelings and open up to the perception of dimensions of the real hidden until that moment. 

Such experiences are expressed ordinarily in the form of questions: "who am I?", in which the questioning of the subject who has just taken place is literally formulated; or in the form of astonishment: "what a marvel", "I am!"; or in terms of desire and decision: "I want to be!", which expresses the tension created in the subject by the appearance of something that until that moment had not even been glimpsed.

The root of human originality

The answer to the question by man has often been sought in the enumeration of the properties that characterize its nature. Located in continuity with the rest of the natural beings, its originality can be placed in reason, which crowns that chain of beings that begins in inorganic nature, passes through living matter and beings endowed with sensitivity and culminates in the animal endowed with reason. Without denying validity to such explanations, the question for man as we have proposed - in the first person: "who am I", as opposed to the third-person question: "what is a human being" - guides the discovery of human originality in something prior to all its properties. It is not simply something added to an undifferentiated nature shared to a greater or lesser extent with the rest of the beings. 

It is, rather, an originality that affects its very being. Things, we could say to refer to that originality in a condensed way, are; man exists. The synthesis that man is is not, like natural things, the simple result of a natural process guided by necessity, the simple addition of the elements that compose it. Man is not the end result of what precedes him, as the manufactured object is from the manufacturing process. Man's own way of being is to assume his nature, to actively exercise the act of being. In things you give the being. Man, on the other hand, has to take it on and exercise it. 

The origin from which it comes puts him into existence, and to be humanly man has to make him his own, "collect" him and exercise him. This relationship with its origin may be interpreted in different ways: as vocation, call, sending or even as condemnation. But, in any case, man is not the result of a process, but the recipient of an act that claims his response. His life appears as well as the synthesis of a gift and a task. As a gift, it consists of a "background" that are realized in a biological heritage, in a culture, in a situation from which the progress of the species and its personal development will liberate it, but from which it can never completely dispense. 

To exist humanly will consist of setting up that gift with which we are born according to the orientation we choose to give it; will be to build with our nature a personal destiny. An expression of conscience and the need for this orientation of one's open life because of the need to assume and exercise one's being is the question that arises in man when he becomes aware of the depths of himself: "What will become of me?" which soon becomes this more rigorous one: "What am I going to do about me?" (Zubiri).

The fundamental-choice

The fundamental choice, man's radical response to the invitation to be that constitutes him, precisely because he is an invitation and not the necessary result of a set of factors, entails the freedom of the subject and can be realized in different ways.

The first may be the attempt to conceal the presence that claims the option, the silence of his voice in the depths of consciousness. In this first response man tries to de-find himself from the need to choose. He intends to give up the option. Either in the form of the installation in the most radical indifference that is insensitive to the requirements of the human condition, or in the form of obsessive dedication to action or distraction that seeks total forgetfulness of itself. Apparently, the indifferent or the distracted manage to avoid the option. But only apparently. Because not wanting to be is, in short, a want not to be (Blondel), an option by emptiness, without a waiver of the option. Even with suicide, man does not escape the need to opt, as this attempt at annihilation is rather a negative form of choice.

The option in time. Fundamental choice and actions of daily life

The description we have offered of this election by the man of his own life is subject to not a few objections, which have their main basis in the perversions to which the effective realization of the option may be subject. It is clear that the option is not an isolated act, done once and for all, and then sufficed to conserve throughout life. Being man a temporal being, who exists only in the "détente of himself" (St Augustine) that we call time, the acceptance of himself, the response to the invitation to be that constitutes our origin, can only be realized in the permanent revocation of the acceptance of a gift that is permanently given to us and of the response to an invitation that is permanently addressed to us.

"Man is created" - as St Ignatius recalls in meditation on principle and foundation - does not mean that he has been put on a good day in existence. It means that it has no other way of existence than to come permanently from God's creative love. That is why faith, in response to God's communication, is not a quality that is acquired and preserved. It is this peculiar form of realization of existence that consists in accepting it at all times, in an always renewed attitude of trust. Human existence, in addition to temporal, is spatial and worldly. It can only be made in the constitutive reference to the world in relation to others. Hence, the effective realization of this acceptance of life which we have called a 'radical choice' must necessarily be degreased into concrete acts, relating to the multiple worldly objects, in which the decision to be has to be made in order to become an effective life.

Thus, the fundamental choice, the decision to believe, which is essentially identical to all men, in each subject takes on a distinct historical body, made of the vicissitudes of each life and the actions of each person. Of course, from the moment the temporality and duration are introduced into the realization of the option, and in its content the specific acts in which it is broken, the possibility of discontinuity and inconsistency is also introduced. It becomes visible in the deviation of decisions and concrete acts in relation to the chosen believing orientation. But the danger of this infidelity will consist, above all, of the possibility of ending up disorienting life, of bringing to the break with the chosen orientation.

Conclusion

"To be or not to be" is not the only question. It is also, and in a very fundamental way, "how to be." Because being does not simply exist in us. From the power of being that is given to us, we have to be, we have to choose and build our being. This is the radical option. The quintessential option. No one can take it for us. In this option everything goes. As the Orientals have seen very well, we are more than life and death: salvation or perdition. And it is an option with many alternatives. We can choose to hide the issue from ourselves and live "fun," but we can never fully hide it from ourselves. How sad it is for a person to have to say one day: What has become of me? What have I done with my life? ...! Once we decide to choose, we are offered two possibilities: to "demand" from the origin from which we arose, from the father from whom we come, the part that corresponds to us; closing ourselves in on ourselves, desperately wanting to be exclusively. It is condemning ourselves to "mortal disease" (Kierkegaard)

Refference 

SAL TERRAE 1994, 4. Pgs. 251-263

 

 

Man in the Face of Pain

Joy and sadness, pleasure and pain represent antagonistic and correlative feelings and perceptions, in that joy can be regarded as mood pleasure and sadness as psychic pain. Joy and sadness are specifically human feelings; pleasure and pain are sensory perceptions, of a physical order, which when they cross the psycho-physical frontier, to put it mildly, become joy and sadness respectively.

Just as death is deprivation of life, pain and sadness are also negative: pain is deprivation of well-being and sadness is deprivation of joy; but we need to deepen the knowledge of pain and pleasure, because not all pain is bad and not every pleasure is good. More, often pleasure and joy, intentionally sought after, lead to pain and sadness. And yet well-accepted and driven pain and sadness can be the beginning of a more full and solid psychic and globally human - health. Pleasure or joy, disconnected from anthropological roots founded on love, truth and freedom can become an existential falsehood that would lead to a crumbling of man. 

 

Meaning of pain 

Few themes reach the degree of universality that characterizes pain. Your registration is as common as it is inevitable. Just as no human being can escape death, which will occur sooner or later, nor can he be exempted from pain, which makes his appearance inexorably throughout life, whether in his body or annymic, physical or moral side. 

Von Weisacker said that the true meaning of life and pain can only be understood from a perspective beyond death. Alfons Auer says that pain is one of the few modules by which man's true value is measured and revealed. This is because pain, both bodily and psychic, penetrates even the innermost part of personal existence, and inescapably demands from man a posture, an attitude. According to and as man speaks in this decision, that is, according to the attitude he adopts in the face of pain, he will contribute to the building of his inner structure  towards maturity or bring him down by sinking him into an existence set up by selfishness and bitterness. 

Pain, like all forms of suffering, entails, in substance, whatever its cause and expression, a bipolar reactive element: pain can lead to both selfishness and generosity; with poveda's words: to the contraction of life to the primary stump, instinctive; or detachment and transcendentalization, which better facilitates knowledge of man's existential limitations and spiritual possibilities. 

 

Eliminating pain at all costs 

The presence of pain in man's life constitutes an unanswerable reality, as is the fact that man instinctively tries to evade it and, when he cannot avoid it, adopts defensive attitudes to arm himself and thus make the painful experience less incisive, or tries to find compensation that, by way of evasion, and for the pleasure that entails , mitigate - in another order of realities - the pain that was not wanted or could not be accepted. 

We live in painful times set up by anguish, uncertainty, resentments, economic precariousness, violence, the crisis of social, family, ethical and moral values. Man is hurting his life, as he presents himself today, and as an escape seeks pleasure as a defensive mechanism, bringing it into the category of vital principle, to which he makes all the values that give meaning to life and, therefore, to pain and suffering, impacting to face those realities that have a mature function. 

Paradoxically, putting as a criterion of life the pursuit of pleasure engenders a tension, in that dissatisfaction following the attainment of relative pleasures demands and somehow determines new and successive checks. This tension often leads to anxiety and, finally, a deep disgust for life, which predisposes man to surrender, insecure and dejected, to an existence without illusions, configured by exhaustless. 

This paradoxical derivation the pleasure that causes pain is caused by the loss of the sense of pain. The purpose of pain is not constrained to the pure biological or sensitive economy. Kant said pain is the sting of action and the basis of life's real feeling. The Christian, coherent and consequential, knows that love cannot be achieved without pain and that, behind every pain, and more safely and immediately, after the pain of death awaits a life in a new world: life is the reproduction of painful gestation that ends with death that, like childbirth, opens way in the light of a new life. 

Pain is a disjunction between being and not being, between making or undoing the mature process of the human personality, between selfishness and generosity, between self-centeredness and transcendentalization. 

The mature and plenifying function that pain can play in the development of the human personality refers to Alfons Auer (Metaphysics of Pain) when it says that nothing essential thrives in human life without pain. Sometimes it will be the pain of becoming and growing, which already makes its violent break in at the time of delivery; others will be the pain of helplessness and hardship, which penetrates the whole life and strikes the old man and the dying of his last crushing blows. These internal and external oppressions are not in themselves valuable, but they invite man to focus, increasingly, on the core of his personality. 

Even if the disease actually has something to do with disorder and falsehood, and health with order and truth, in every pain there is a healthy force that drives us to move towards order and authenticity. 

In pain man is shaken and unprotected from his usual safety. Health, well-being and even life cease to be something we take of course and that we do not value or appreciate when, as a free gift, we are offered. Pain also vanishes the illusion that the external things of life are our property, that they are sufficient and indispensable, in any aspect, to live a full existence. The mature man knows that such illusions perish and must give way to the truth. For only in truth is man found totally himself, only on the basis of truth can he realize the possibilities offered to him. Perhaps pain will free you from a crippling complacency in itself and prompt you to make serious commitments, or perhaps force you to observe a more prudent modesty regarding your life plans. 

Progressive intolerance in the face of displeasure, associated with a growing attraction to immediate pleasure, causes man to lose the ability to face arduous commitments, which are the only ones that produce true satisfaction. The result of this attitude," says Konrad Lorenz, is the impatient and immature anxiety of which demands the immediate satisfaction of all incipient desires. The exaggerated desire to avoid at all costs the slightest disgust, which grows incessantly today, has as its insurmountable sequel the achievement of pleasures that are a consequence of effort, dedication and pain. 

Pain, as a deprivation, is not good and should be put in the right means to eliminate it; and the doctor, as a health care professional, must contribute all his knowledge to achieve it. But, in Viktor Frankl's words, the elimination of pain at all costs cannot be a standard of medical action. In no way should the doctor aspire to euphoria at any price. Euphoria at all costs would be equivalent to partial euthanasia. The mission of psychotherapy every medical act is psychotherapeutic is not only to make man fit for work, for pleasure, it is also about helping him to be able to suffer. 

In the face of pain, which is inevitable and which is an integral part of human existence, one must discover its meaning, its "why" and, then, it will not be so incisive. There is nothing as devastating as suffering and not knowing why it is suffered, and there is nothing as liberating as finding the truth, with the knowledge of the purpose which always exists of pain. 

Perhaps these considerations are the reason for the hedonistic attitude and consequent suffering of today's man: the capacity to suffer is being lost, the values that give true meaning to life are relativized and, because of this lack of convictions and fortitude in the face of physical and moral pain, man divorces from any unpleasant situation without giving time to discover his value and meaning , and is anxiously cast into the search for pleasurable substitutes that degrade and plunge him further into suffering and his own inability to renew and, consequently, to mature and to bring about existential realization.  

 

Psychological pain analysis 

He said before that pain is one of the few realities from which no human being can be freed: he presents himself inexorable, sooner or later, in any of his forms, bodily or moody, physical or moral. As pain is so necessarily linked to life, its meaning will depend on what each man gives to his life. 

John Paul II faced this reality - especially pressing in our day and, with regard to the sense of pain, says: "Within every suffering experienced by man and also deep in the world of suffering, the question inevitably appears why? It's a question about the purpose (for what); in short, about the sense This not only accompanies human suffering, but seems to determine even human content... Only man, when he suffers, knows that he suffers and wonders why, and suffers even deeper humanly if he does not find a satisfactory answer." 

 

Alarm signal 

Pain is an alarm signal that warns of a vital threat to body or mental health. Pain helps the doctor locate and diagnose the disease, such as sadness (mood pain) helps the psychiatrist diagnose the patient's depressive (endogenous or reactive, anxious, or inhibited) modality and provides guidance for appropriate treatment. 

But often, pain - as an alarm signal - is gagged, through analgesic and symptomatic treatments, and the cause is difficult to find. Similarly, a sadness can be gagged by the pathways of compensatory evasion (alcohol, drugs, sexual excesses, anger at work, aggressiveness, etc.), without giving choice to the encounter and healing of the cause of that painful sadness. 

When advocates of miscarriage and euthanasia argue that all "useless suffering" must be avoided, even at the cost of eliminating the lives of the unborn or the evicted old, they are stripping human life - and the pain that inevitably accompanies it - of its most dignifying sense. If man's supreme ideal were only physical and material well-being, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, then pain would be an absolute evil and euthanasia and abortion would serve to mitigate it. 

But pain performs vital and psychological functions that give it meaning and therefore relativize it: pain is never absolute, nor useless. The doctor's mission cannot be constrained to the elimination of pain at all costs, but use it to find the cause and then apply the appropriate remedy to eliminate it; In the meantime, to facilitate through timely psychotherapy the patient to unravel from him the mature and enriching function of his personality, with the finding of a satisfactory answer to the pressing question of why of pain.  

When man assumes and gives meaning to his pain, he turns to his own maturity; without the contradictions which always arise in the environment in which man moves, in his family, social and professional action, with the responsibility demanded by his rights and duties in the community - there is a danger of inhibiting himself and remaining, as paralyzed, adopting a more or less infantiloid attitude. Contradictions polish the edges and deformities of personality, to give the polished and cohesive form of maturity, to establish the unity of thoughts, affections and actions - consequence of being one, conscious and free - and permanence or stability in the fundamental attitudes or decisions that are made. Permanence that, let us clarify, does not mean inflexibility: when circumstances change, solutions change, but not the principles that determined the previous decision. 

With pain, the personal attitude of the human being is no longer influenced and generated by the environment, to anchor itself more and more in inner principles, in an intrinsic self that adapts to all circumstances, but without identifying with them, remaining faithful to itself. Thus, the facts present preserve the future teleological unit, without losing sight of the past. There is no doubt that this is enriching itself.

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(Cfr Fears of Man, Ed. Rialp)

CHOOSE "THE" LIFE

To choose life is to choose the "present"

Life is an abstract thing, a concept. On the other hand, it is always radically concrete: such a person, animal, thing, time... and above all, it can only be lived in the present, in dynamic "the here and the now".

We walk very often escaping from the present, from our present, without realizing that we have no other and that is where we are only alive. We are fleeing our reality, longing for the past or projecting the future. That is why "modern man lives in a state of mediocre vitality.... knows little about what it's like to live in a truly creative way..., he's become a distressed automaton.... poker face, boring, distracted or irritated, deft to talk about their evils and bad to face them, he spends long hours trying to recover the past or shaping the future..., his activities of the present moment are nothing more than tasks that have to be fulfilled...sometimes he does not even realize his actions at the moment".

It is true that our present, social and personal, becomes difficult and often incomprehensible. In our time, every 20 years are like a century earlier in knowledge, techniques, resources. The figures - so packed with statistics - no longer tell us anything, but our psychology suffers from this overflowing acceleration. In the last 50 years there has been a technological revolution that seems to have only just begun. Our ability to enjoy life, however, has not gone at the same speed. We miss the present moment. 

The past is past; only the present is open, alive, if he is not awake in it. Many flee from present reality by saying, 'If I could know where I come from, then I could.' it's an escape... Most people are like young children, they don't wonder where they come from or where they're going; they just worry about walking, eating, living experiences. Some individuals reach the threshold of thought and begin to pose problems. Some find religion, others find teachers who give them answers. You cannot live in the past, nor in the future, but in the present. Use every moment. Use what's there. Most people never see that. They spend their lives always looking for something different, they go through the persuaded existence that their goal is much further away, when around them is everything they need to achieve their goal... Wise men, those who know how to help people see themselves, do not let themselves be implicating themselves for what they have been. They care no more than the present moment. You can see the future and the past, but they don't get carried away by each other." 

To choose life is to choose "to be oneself"

Trying to be the concrete person we are, unique and at the same time equal to others, is the adventure of life. To choose one's life is to live with oneself, not with the image, let alone with the social role we play, but with one's own reality. Feeling like a man, a woman, just as deep in others.

We always work with images, with perceptions and representations of reality. Without wanting to go into controversy of psychological schools about fantasy, image, reality, we can plot contractions, taking them to extremes to find more clarity. Certainly there are people who cease to be themselves because they live or, better, are lived by their image, personally rewarding and socially captative, who end up eating them. We were brought up, at least in a certain type of education, to be as perfect "images" as possible of someone or something. Perfection, the end, was so important that almost everything was worth it. Unfortunately, the description would also be worth, with its own nuances, for the present ...). Even the one that was being forgotten the most fundamental and human needs. How many current crises of self-esteem; impossibility of expressing the most human, the feelings; to recommend the healthy aggression and confrontation, without which we die helpless and landed, torn apart by the inner and outer wolves...! .

To experience that we are like others, of flesh and blood, of sex and affection, of death and life. How many easy and docile psychological constructions based on inherited logical norms, morality without possible exceptions, in roles, social roles felt as necessary to maintain the effectiveness and stereotypical gear of institutions...! and how many slow, painful, reconstructions to feel the most natural again, such as the human heart, lanecessity of recognition and the experience of simple and important utility! To be oneself is to try to be free, and freedom is a conquest made of sometimes painful and exclusionary options.  

It is logical that at the end, or in the middle of the route, one is very tired inside; as if he were running the career of life with "a sn sle in his stomach" or "a strange backpack behind his back." The healthy thing, once again returning to humanist psychology, is "updating". What I feel deep and in the epidermis of my body and spirit, of my spiritual body, I will let it feel, I will allow it to emerge as my own, I will be aware of it and try to make it a reality in the way and measure I can. I'm going to be myself. 

"The meaning of life is that it must be lived and should not be changed and conceptualized within a system scheme. We are realizing that management and control are not the ultimate happiness of life... It is to become true, to learn to take an option, to define oneself, to develop the center of oneself... Achieve the ability to fend for yourself as a human being."

Choosing life is being aware and meeting needs

Man and woman are beings of need. Being in touch with them, let them feel, knowing how to express them in authenticity, will be a path of psychological growth. One of the problems of human needs is that they are authentically human. 

In the study on the psychological evolution of human growth, basic needs and superiors (physiological needs - security, peace, order - belonging, affection - esteem, prestige, success - and self-realization). We can rank our needs by virtue of the hierarchy of values that operates within us. Maturity, in one of its traits, implies the fluidity of this process, which asks to organize the behavior according to a hierarchy of needs and the ability to concentrate operationally and successively on its execution. Man is "the most helpless of animals" and depends on others at birth. The animal is happy if its physiological needs are met. In the case of man, meeting his instinctive needs is not enough to make him happy. He wants to feel love and freedom. Without love you can't choose life. 

A life without love is not life. St Paul is blunt as a sword: "without love I am nothing" (1 Cor 13). But not only the Christian tradition, but all deeply human traditions and cultures go down this line: "Be not without love, because it means death. Live in love so that you are alive" (Tallaludim Rumi). "the soul is alive, for it lives from love. A man who loves nothing but skin and bones" (Hindu author of the 2nd century).

 To choose life is to live "day and night"

No one can escape from day and night. This one, dark and often in solitude, costs more. It is not easy to adapt to the low slope, to the weakly illuminated path where the parts of the unwanted person itself are being rewrapped, repressed parts that need to be integrated into a new identity more authentic and real. Those feelings of passivity, dependence, weakness, fragility, inevitable frustration...

In this society, as hypocritical possibly as that of any other era, and in the representation of the theater of this world, the weak are misseen. Society pushes for "character"; a solid character that makes us effective and predictable. But true human wealth does not go down the line of character that grabs and mechanized. We tend to relate to others from our safety, qualities, money, talent, culture, hiding our weaknesses and limitations, without realizing that they are also human and that it is through them that others can feel the same. Then they may not admire us, but they will love us; and this is what really saves us.

In this society you have to be very mature to relate to yourself and others from one's own weakness and poverty. And even more so to be able to share it without feeling superior to anyone, but the same, and letting yourself be accompanied. This vital journey of day and night goes through crisis, at a time when the questions and the crucial situations are greater than the vital answers available to us, thus destabilizing our psychology, which begins to emit signals.

Choosing life is accepting death

As we've seen, choosing life has a lot to do with dying. That's how paradoxical life is. To die of schemes, structures, needs, even people we considered vital, irreplaceable, eternal. Sooner or later we stumbled upon death as a reality of life, although today, in the society of the well-being and pleasure of the first world, it is taboo, as in another time were sexuality or politics. But there it is, for example, in our great fear of old age. There is talk of the "culture of death" because, in a trivial way, it is part of our daily landscape, especially television. How many violent, horrible, trivial, even funny deaths per minute? And at the same time, as if it didn't exist, it's hidden from daily life. 

....................

 References 

J. GARCIA FORCADA SAL-TERRAE/94/04. Pages 265-275

FRITZ PERIS, Dream and existence, Ed. Cuatro Vientos, Santiago de Chile 1974.