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
