So Peter was visiting Paradise this week – the Outpost that is! This is arguably the most perfect spot for philosophical discussions. The sun and stars are shinning in all their glories, the trees are caressed by the wind, Nature – without the least care for us humans – cycles on her own terms. It’s idyllic enough to feel removed from the ills of the World of Man, utterly separate from the main land of rushing around. Like I said, it’s the perfect spot from which to contemplate: there is space, there is beauty, there is separation. (And still a modern Internet connection)
For both of us, our urge to contemplate profoundly shapes our lives. I still wonder how Peter avoided severe bullying for being such a bookish boy. As for me, my most formative place was the dining room table, where every view could be expressed as long as they could be argued. The thinking, exploring, defending of ideas was a welcomed practice. As a teen, I didn’t understand that other families were not arguing politics, business and public policies on a regular basis. Meanwhile, I certainly got an education in freethinking, rhetoric, and the chance to practice the courage it takes to stand up to my ideas. As it turns out, I am my self-father’s daughter in all but genetic make-up.
Our need to contemplate now expresses itself in this website, where we can indulge in the luxury of an unconstrained stroll in the noosphere. So we talked about this website; how to make it even better and how we have different voices. Not only are we two different individuals, with our unique point of views and background, but it emerged that we also have different goals. The nuance is both subtle and profound.
The questions we explore – what it means to be human – are a tangle of ideas: just like Christmas light strings coming out of storage in November. No matter how careful you were in folding the strings, it seems that ‘something’ happened in the bin to knot the whole thing onto itself. It’s a tangled mess, and the longer the string, the more complete the mess. Pull on the wrong strand at your own risk, because – in my experience – unless you are methodic about it, you risk making the whole thing ‘unsolvable’.
So Peter looks at the tangle of light strings and says: “Wow, how precious. Let me follow this one stand and see how it is tangled with its neighbors.” Sometimes, he gets to a tight knot and composes essays like the ones on the Morality of the Artists. Some other times, it is a pleasant walk down his stream of consciousness. But his goal is to bear witness to the strings, not to untangle them.
Meanwhile, I look at the tangled mess of fascinating concepts and I am in a deep panic. How can I possibly start to explore this jumble? My mind wants to know the ‘solution’ before starting to pull at strings. For the longest time, I just stared. Given the level of complexity, it is not possible (ie: not fair for me to expect that I can) just ‘see’ what humanness is and how we fit as a society – both how we are and ought to be – in one clear and instantaneous vision. And even if I had the ‘revelation’, a model of humanity’s core precepts in my soul, how could I share it with my beloved world ?
Language here is my friend: it is useful to put words on the strings, and not only be looking at the ideas with our heart. [I hypothesize that one can feel ideas as much as thinking about ideas. I propose so because when I contemplate, my mind is home to a mix of impressions and thoughts – some in sentence forms but rarely arguments per say. My intuitions are always leaps that I have to reverse engineer if I want to comprehend their logic and origin.]
So I look at the tangle of ideas and know that putting words on even a partial subset of those deep thoughts is useful. It’s like arguing at the dinner table, but with more time to lay-out one’s argument. Still, I am pursuing the embedded goal of ‘finding the solution’: finding how these ideas about humanity – both in its individual and collective forms – line up elegantly on one string of thoughts. I believe that there is such at least one but probably multiple ways to verbalize this vast complexity into prose, a prose both insightful and accessible. This is the book I want to write. However, to believe that there is a linear way to untangle the multiple strings of human consciousness is in itself an act of faith: I have no proof that such complexity can be ‘reduced’ to a line of enquiry without losing so much of its essence as to be meaningless.
Still, what I do know for sure is that the transmission of information via language is a linear process. A text has a beginning, a middle and an end, which hopefully convincingly argues an hypothesis successfully enough as to change the opinions and/or behavior of the readers. There are other ways to communication, like visually through art, but the coding/decoding of non-verbal information is even more dependent on subjective interpretation. Hence, my best bet to clearly convey what I think to the most people is through a judicious use of the English language.
Back to our analogy, ‘what is means to be human’ is a sphere of tangled ideas, both intellectual and intuitive, some subjective and unique to individual’s background, some relative to culture and norms, some linked to consciousness and potentially intemporal. The strands through which we can intellectually comprehend this whole are both on the surface of the sphere, and within its mass. By the virtue of our individuality, we are looking at this sphere from slightly different angles, so we do not see the same exact thing. [That furthermore assumes that the sphere is the same – in essence[i] – for every looker: which we do not know that it is.]
So we are looking at this sphere, which may or may not be One human essence but nonetheless is composed of what is essential to be human. And as naive as it may sound, I am trying to make it fit on a line. Because the train of thought of a text, with its linear simplicity and the ‘rules of engagement’ – of both grammar and logical argumentation -, seems the best way we have to communicate.
So here I am, philosophizing. My goal is not only to see the world, myself and others as we are and could be, but also to share in that knowledge and jointly ponder what we ‘ought’ to be. I want to belong to a humanity who understands itself, its strengths and weaknesses, its pitfalls and potentials. I aspire to belong to a humanity that is aware of itself, awakened to its responsibilities, and in pursuit of wisdom; individually and collectively, subjectively and scientifically. When I am ‘reaching for the stars’, that is what I am actually reaching for.
I ultimately care enough about the tangle of conceptual strings to spend time and effort in contemplation. But I understand that this pursuit, this conversation – either at the dining room table or here virtually-, is not everyone’s cup of tea. We all have our preferences (no judgment in matter of tastes); some people may not find pleasure in abstractly dissecting themselves, their motivations, their relationships with others and the consequences of their actions. I empathize, because it can be pretty agonizing to face uncomfortable truths. And if not unpleasant, it remains plain work to think deep and hard about anything. It’s exerting the mental muscle, and why do it if we don’t have to?
Peter expressed bafflement. I reply that indeed, it is somewhat rare – and in all likelihood, a characteristic of a minority – to enjoy thinking and debating about the complexity of human life. As you might imagine, Peter and I have verbal jousts for the sheer joy of it. It’s the intellectual version of the friendly squash match, as satisfying as an afternoon playing bridge. I can understand that others might indeed prefer squash or bridge (or whatever their preference might be) to discussing the merits and constraints of various social policies.
Still, until my first year in university, I assumed that everyone – as least some of the time – enjoyed thinking of and talking about personal agency: our very human ability to make choices and to act according to individual values. To me, it was self-evident that we have choices, however constrained by our circumstances. But we ultimately have free will in determining what we ‘ought’ to do based on the ‘set of cards that life has dealt us’. In other words, I believe that we are ‘Master of our Fate / Captain of our Soul’; if not fully, then at least at the margin (and given the compounding effects of past choices, to a very large degree in the long run).
I found more resistance than I thought. Numerous times, my conversations met only with baffled faces, people plainly acknowledging to me that they don’t view life as a long series of choices. Life might not entirely be pre-ordained, but the path is clearly laid: go to school, get a job, marry (or shack up in less religious societies), buy a house, make a kid or two. Do what others and/or society expects. Fill in the details like you wish, but fit in the mold!
I was baffled: these were millennial youth just like me, told repeatedly that they could be and do whatever they wanted to. And yet, to conform is what they wanted to do. And probing – in the gentlest of Socratic tradition – led them to acknowledge that it is the absence of agency that they were actually choosing. Talk about a way to make friends!
I deduced from these episodes that not everyone wishes to take responsibility for their own lives and choices. That it is indeed much easier to do what we are told. Far from all people take it upon themselves to find the place that THEY wish to take into the world, as opposed to the places available for them. I understand that it is much harder to steer one’s ship than to drift. However, the risk of waking up one day, a stranger in one’s own life, is simply too great… According to Bonnie Wane’s Regret of the Dying, the #1 regret on our deathbed is indeed “…to wish to have had the courage to live a life true to ourselves, not the life others expected.”
So it seems that we – humans – may come to recognize the depth and breath of our personal agency only later in life, sometimes well into our elderly years. It seems part of our humanness that – at some point – we acknowledge the choices that we did or didn’t make as our own successes and failings. We may blame them on others; but on closer examinations, most failings, even collective ones, can be sourced back to individuals. [See Mark’s ‘Blaming Ourselves’ for a clear argument – I simply extrapolate from his conclusions (at my own risk)].
Since my youth, I have met many people who came to that realization in their mid-life crisis. They come to their self-awakening only after investing so much time and efforts in what they thought they were expected to. This seems like a lot of wasted years, but maybe we can only come to embrace our sense of agency after we have felt it slip away from ourselves… Or is there a way to culturally foster the development of the sense of agency? Maybe, and this line of enquiry seems like a good place to start my exploration of the tangled light strings of human life.
I’ll propose, as my first strand to pull, that our sense of agency is one of the key characteristics of humanity – of what makes humans more than animals. We are ‘subjectively aware’ through our thinking process that we can initiate, execute and control our actions willfully.[ii] It is not our ability to impact the world that is distinct from animals, because obviously, animals feed, make shelters, sometimes make amazing display in the sand to court females. (See video of Pufferfishes amazing creations! ) What is humanly distinct is the ‘thinking that we can do’ about our actions: our sentience. It is ultimately our ability to contemplate our actions and make informed choice that makes humans such a special breed!
Ideally, we also (gradually) understand that our actions are governed by our desires, our beliefs, our intentions and our judgments. These abstract notions – all of our thoughts – might be shared with others, but we ‘ought’ at some point realize that we – the human individual – has either adopted them from someone within the human collective (ie: the noosphere) OR we came up with them on our own. In both cases, thoughts – in as much as they are the foundations of our actions – are ours and we have an inherent responsibility to consider them carefully (if we want to fully embody our humanness).
So thinking, or contemplating, is not only the process that gives us our individual existence as human – cogito: I think therefore I am. It is not only a special ability, a characteristic of humanness. It is a necessity – to think – in order to live a full human life. If our essence is to think, consider and ultimately decide; then it is essential that we think, consider and ultimately decide. In other words, if the miracle of what makes us humans is cognition, then it is essential that we be aware and using our cognitive process.
As a species, we do think (though maybe not as much as we ‘ought’). What makes thinking about our humanness different than thinking about ‘stuff’ is our own individual humanity: the fact that ultimately, we are thinking about our own human self. Since it is a form of self-reflection, it is de factonot objective. In thinking about thinking (ie: meta-thinking), we have intimate access to one consciousness – our own – and can only intuit that others have similar mental space and functions. The only way to know that we are extrapolating correctly is to compare notes (and our sample group might never be the whole of humanity!).
So back to the sphere of ‘what it means to be human’. Since we are observing the human essence from the vantage point of our own individual humanity, it turns out that we might be somewhere inside the sphere – looking out and all around. This sphere might be just like our galaxy, not a sphere after all, but something with its own internal logic, flattened only by our perspective. We can certainly contemplate our consciousness in awe, and seek to understand its nature – just like the Ancients did with the stars…
[i]Whatever that means, I simply do not have a better word at this time…
[ii]Pretty much the definition provided by Wikipedia for ‘Sense of Agency’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency