The Search: The Existential Dilemma of the Human Being, Sections IV.-VI.

IV.      

In the face of our  isolation within the physical Universe, we take comfort, perhaps, in the idea that we on this tiny planet at least have each other. But as we struggle to make ourselves understood, as we wrestle with our own natures, and as we struggle to understand others, we may find ourselves increasingly unsure of the degree to which we actually do have each other. We therefore ask the following urgent questions: Can I know myself? Can I know others? Can others know me? The answers are ones we usually don’t want to accept.

It takes many years for the typical human to understand, both emotionally and intellectually, that he or she sees the world in a way unlike that of any other human. When we are children, we simply assume, I believe, that everyone sees what we see and feels what we feel. (It could be said that when we are very young children we are so absorbed in our own reaction to the world that we simply don’t care what anyone else feels.)  The different reactions of people to the events of life are puzzling when we are young, even disturbing to us. How can you feel that way? How can you not agree with me?

But as we get older, we usually find the nature of our interactions growing more complex. More and more subtle misunderstandings arise. Other people often confuse us or anger us with their seemingly inexplicable behaviors. A conclusion usually becomes more and more inescapable to us: no one can possibly know the interior mental world of another human being, and, by inference, no other human can really know ours. Of course, from our youngest moments, most of us have been spoken to and immersed in the ocean of a particular language. We have been taught to communicate with others using this medium in the hope that we could convey our internal experience to others. But the inadequacies of language—its ambiguity, its imprecision, its frequently abstract nature, its infinite shades of meaning—impede our ability to convey meaning to each other. Gradually, if we force ourselves to look at it honestly, we come to realize that no one will ever truly understand 100% of what we mean. We come to realize that even we don’t always know what we mean, as we so often try to find words for feelings that no words can express. This realization manifests itself sometimes as resentment, sometimes as sorrow, sometimes as amused resignation, sometimes as a sort of cosmic indifference. In many of us, it creates a sense of  existential loneliness, and an unbridgeable isolation from other people. And there is more.

When we are in quiet moments, we often cannot get a handle on what we are experiencing at the eternal present. When we fall into the infinity of mirrors that is the attempt by the brain to understand the brain, it often produces a sense of indescribable mystification. We are reduced to thinking, “What is all this? What is experience itself?” Our brains’ inherent inability to grasp the whole reality that surrounds us strikes us at these moments, even if we don’t put the sense of how  strange we feel into any words. We are simply swallowed up by our own minds, which are the product of a lifetime of sensations and interactions that have had effects on us that are simply too complicated for us to grasp. Not only are our reactions to experience too complex to sort out, these reactions are based on information about ourselves that oftentimes we just don’t have any more. We often don’t have any idea of what the root of a specific emotional response actually is. We have lost the thread of our lives, and it cannot be located again. 

It is at these moments that an even darker realization occurs to us: since we can not convey total, unfiltered meaning to each other, and since we cannot account for all the many conflicting and competing emotions within us, we not only will never understand others, we will never really understand ourselves. If we dwell on this, the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves crashes down on us. We will never know others; others will never know us; we will never know ourselves. And yet, here we all are, thrown together, having to live with each other and interact with each other. It is as if the entire human population is a set of inmates, each one a prisoner in his or her own skull, trying to grasp enough of the world to survive in it (or, hopefully, prosper), and trying to communicate with the other prisoners trapped inside of their skulls.  It is in communication that our only hope of lessening our sense of isolation, and hence our existential loneliness, lies.

Communication is the basis of human interaction and in a very real sense, of human survival. Humans must convey part of their internal experience to others, right from the start of life, and must in turn attempt to apprehend part of the internal experience of others. But as I said above, such communication will always be approximate. (The more abstract and less concrete the concepts used in communication, the more approximate this communication will be.) I will examine the significant impediments to communication in more detail elsewhere. (See The Nature and Continuing Evolution of Language.)

Our only hope of understanding anything about each other is in the possession of common ground. If  I refer to something as being red, only your visual experience of a red object will suffice for you to grasp my meaning. (The mathematical formulae describing red as a wavelength will not suffice if you have never seen a red object.) If I tell you something is hot, only your tactile experience of a hot object will stir any degree of understanding in you. (And your associations with the words red and hot may be very, very different from mine.) At a minimum, we need some sort of linguistic and/or gestural common ground to grasp part of each other’s meaning. We need a store of common experience and common points of reference, a certain amount of shared information and shared skills (which is why education of some form is indispensable to people). But we will have to accept the fact that since it is logically impossible to be another person, and to have the whole set of that person’s knowledge, experience, emotional state, and state of consciousness at our disposal at a given moment of communication, we will never entirely tear down the walls of isolation. We will perceive reality in a way which may be very similar to others, but it can never, by definition, be exactly the perception of any other person. (The upshot of all this is if I’m right, I can’t be 100% certain why I feel the need to express this to you. And you can’t be 100% certain you know what I mean.)

Are the ambiguous nature of communication, our resulting sense of existential loneliness, and the unanswered mysteries of our own personalities the real origins of our quest for certainty? Are they the sources of our desire to believe that we understand, and the illusion that we are understood? Do the huge questions most of us feel are so important about God, death, suffering, the meaning of existence, the nature of truth, and others like them have their root in our sense of isolation? Does this feeling of being isolated engender in us the desire, ultimately, to be connected with a reality where the self can be subsumed into a greater and more significant whole and language has a single, definite meaning? Can it even give us the desire to live in a reality where words no longer matter?

V.   

Many people find out about human cruelty and perversity far too early in life, and any hope these people have of being able to count on and be reassured by the behavior of others is critically damaged, often irreparably so, by trauma suffered in childhood. Most others are more fortunate, but sooner or later, everyone is exposed to the sins and weaknesses that our complex psychologies give rise to: corruption, lies, betrayal, and injuries in endless variety. Since humans must be able to predict and anticipate the behavior of others for their own safety (and indeed this is so crucial that some researchers believe consciousness itself arose out of this need), the question, Who can I trust, and to what degree? is of the utmost importance. It’s worth looking at what we mean by the word “trust”. (See also The Sinews of Trust in Section VII for a fuller discussion.)

Trust can be thought of as the willingness to let our defenses down—to be vulnerable, either physically or emotionally, or both—with another human or group of humans. This willingness to be vulnerable is based on an assessment of the predictability of other people’s behavior. If, in a particular setting, we feel that those who are present with us mean us no harm (at minimum), are positively inclined toward us (in a middle case), or would sacrifice important things to defend us (the maximum case), there is a feeling of trust. If I know that you are not going to try to hurt me, and will in fact be my ally, I can set aside my internal readiness to fight or flee, and relax emotionally.

There are, obviously degrees of trust between people, ranging from trust in a person in a limited setting for a limited duration all the way to people one can trust with one’s life. Knowing the difference between those we can trust with small things and those we can trust with the ultimate things is of obvious evolutionary importance. It is trust of an unspoken kind that regulates much of ordinary human behavior, and in situations where trust between people is low or completely absent, anarchy and “the war of all against all” tends to be the rule.

Is betrayal so sharply felt because the need for trust is so deeply embedded in our brains? There seems to be something fundamental about betrayal that causes humans to respond to it with deep anger and hurt. Is this an indication of how ancient the need for trust really is?

We see the suffering of others; we experience suffering, perhaps very severe, ourselves. We can imagine injury and pain from experience, and if we are rational (and not under the stress of life-or-death circumstances) we seek to avoid them at all costs. We especially seek to protect our children from them, very often at the price of our own well-being. We hear of or even witness horrors; dark fears insinuate themselves into our thinking, and one of the most elemental of all questions demands our attention: How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? I say “the world” in this formulation because many of our fears are centered in the generalized “others” who share the world with us, the strangers who may do us harm. (The issue of trust is at play here, of course.) We seek to give ourselves and those we love safe places in which to live, and we seek further to control as many of the potentially dangerous variables in our environment as we can. The inability to control these variables can lead to a feeling of helplessness, rage, frustration, despair, and chronic fear. People trapped in war zones or in generally lawless areas know the terrible urgency of finding safety, in many ways the prime objective of a living thing. The fear, caution, preparation, and alertness demanded by the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe has been one of the chief factors driving human history. Magnified over an entire population, the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe is at the heart of our defense efforts (although the individual soldier may be fighting under compulsion).

The issue of protecting one’s self and one’s loved ones is so significant that it is usually the priority consideration in a person’s life. The quest for security and the need to prepare for dangers which may emerge either from malicious strangers or unpredictable nature can lead to the sacrifice of all other values. Conversely, the failure to protect one’s loved ones (or the perceived failure) can lead a human down the most grievous abysses of despair. The protection of one’s kin, in particular, may have extremely ancient evolutionary roots; only the survival of the precious genes guarantees continuation of our line. The anguish we feel when those we love have been harmed may in part be rooted in this. Add in the depths of emotional attachment that people usually feel for those related to them, and the suffering of our loved ones becomes utterly intolerable, a fate to be avoided at any cost, including the abandonment of even the most deeply held moral beliefs. How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? For most people, the answer is, “Any way I have to.”

Survival may be a tremendous achievement for many people, and the minimal protection of themselves and their loved ones a true victory, given the often harsh realities of the world. But most people, at least in the more economically advanced areas of the Earth, seek something more once the basic minimums of life have been secured. Specifically, most people want to know the purpose of the human enterprise itself. They want to know, “Is there a larger purpose to life than mere survival, and if so, what is it?” This question is related to “How should I live my life?” but it is not identical to it. It contains the unspoken question, “Why do we live?” It also encompasses more than just one’s self, for it implies that humans as a group have some sort of mission to fulfill, and that this mission is both significant and discoverable. The answers people give to this question very often reveal deeply held personal beliefs or prejudices. A person might say that the purpose of life is to prepare for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, or that the purpose of life is to prepare for Eternity, or the purpose of life is to eradicate human suffering, or the purpose of life is to grab everything for yourself that you can before you die or the purpose of life is to have children and grandchildren and pass one’s family name down. Others might say in response to this question, “Purpose? There is no such thing. We just live and do the best we can, and then we die.” That statement very often also reveals deeply held beliefs, although most people might not readily perceive this. However it is answered, one thing is consistent: if a purpose is believed to exist, it is considered the main overall reason a person lives his or her life. It is the ultimate, overriding goal. It is, in essence, the root of a personal philosophy.

           

VI. 

At a young age, most people begin to be given what will turn out to be a long series of instructions on what to do and what not to do. They will have these rules impressed into them in any number of ways, many of them physically hurtful ones. Also at a young age people will begin to glean lessons from the culture with which they are surrounded about what constitutes “right conduct”.  As a person grows older, he or she will generally begin making judgments about the behavior of others, perhaps comparing it to the standards of behavior which they have absorbed (in their uniquely individual way) from their kinship group, neighbors, and community. Whether they realize it or not, when they do this, most people are applying a set of standards that govern a general system by which the behavior of others is regulated (and by which their own behavior is in turn regulated). They are forming answers to the question, “What is right and what is wrong?”

This question is, naturally, at the very heart of what humans call their moral or ethical systems, and it has been answered in any number of ways. Wrong conduct, being abnormal and disruptive, seems to be identified more readily than right conduct, which tends to become part of the human mental background, part of the definition of “normality”. Among the definitions of wrong conduct humans have given over the centuries, the following tend to be the most prominent:

·        Whatever violates the sacred teachings of the religion which is dominant in our culture.

·        Whatever disrupts the orderly conduct of business and social relationships in our society.

·        Whatever undermines the unity of our people.

·        Whatever shows disloyalty to the rulers of our society.

·        Whatever violates the prerogatives of parents over their children.

·        Whatever brings dishonor to and condemnation of a family.

·        Whatever violates the person or property of a human being who has committed no offense against anyone.

·        Whatever undermines the trust people in our society have to have in order to live with each other.

·        Whatever is, in general, contrary to the laws, norms, and traditions of our people.

·        Whatever actions those in power take that are corrupt or unjust.

·        Any combination of any of the above with varying degrees of emphasis on the individual guidelines.

Notice that only two or three of these statements could in any way be interpreted as emphasizing the primacy of the individual or the rights of a human against the power of those who govern him. In fact, throughout human history, questions of right and wrong have seldom been left to individual judgment, nor have they focused primarily on the rights of the person. Wrong conduct has generally been defined as conduct which undermines the collective well-being of a society, conduct which attacks the institutions on which the society is based. (Right conduct, naturally, is generally considered the exact inverse of each of the above statements.) Virtually every human who has ever lived, until the last few hundred years, has lived under definitions of right or wrong behavior similar to this. Respect for the individual’s privacy and personal conduct has, in the larger context, been an aberration in human history, not the norm.

But humans face moral and ethical dilemmas of a smaller scale every day, ones for which guidelines are not always clear. How should I treat those whom I don’t know? How friendly or unfriendly should I be to those I do know? Should I always be bluntly honest, or should I value tact above all? Should I help people I don’t know, or ignore all but the needs of my own family? Can I rightfully take advantage of the ignorance or gullibility of other people? It is this mass of billions of small moral decisions that often steer the day-to-day course of our world more than the broader and more formalized rules that govern societies.

Questions of right and wrong, can, of course, be given more ominous interpretations. What is right and what is wrong? Some answers are:

• Whatever benefits me is right; whatever doesn’t benefit me is wrong.
• Whatever promotes the power of my group is right; whatever lessens it is wrong.
• Whatever hurts the people I hate is right; whatever doesn’t hurt the people I hate is wrong.

The terrible simplicity of such answers has very often been the basis for the most obscene crimes and atrocities in human history. And, unfortunately, those who reduce all of life to a simple question of whether they’re getting their way or not prevail more than we would like to admit.

We are confronted on a daily basis with assertions of fact, statements which claim to be “true” in the sense that they are, presumably, empirically demonstrable. We are presented with claims of evidence, claims that such-and-such an event occurred in real time at a real place. We have to make decisions about what we believe to be truly real. We are faced with the existential question, therefore, “What is true and what is false?” Upon this question rest whole belief systems and ideologies, as well as the related issues of whether we can even reliably ascertain answers to such a question. We are forced to define what we mean by “true” and “false”. How have people gone about doing so?

Throughout human existence, people have generally thought that whatever they perceived with their own senses was true. “I saw it with my own eyes” is considered conclusive proof to most of us. As far as the truth of larger things is concerned, there have been other methods employed. In most societies of the past, for example, the test of whether something was true or not was simple: do those with the ability to contact the supernatural plane of existence say that it is? If those believed to have this power passed a judgment on such a question, it was generally considered authoritative. There are gods, there is a soul, there are gods that weigh the soul in the balance after death, there is a sacred river we cross only in death, there are sacrifices which must be made to placate the gods, things can come alive again after dying, and all manner of such beliefs have been accepted as true because those with specialized knowledge of the metaphysical said so. Until a few hundred years ago this was considered the most powerful standard of truth in the vast majority of human societies.

But there have been, for many centuries, those for whom religious authority was insufficient. Some 2,500 years ago, on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, a small group of thinkers began the attempt to ascertain the truth or falsity of things through argument and the employment of reason, rather than by recourse to spiritual or mythological explanations of the world. In Asia, various thinkers looked beyond traditional faiths and began the search for what they considered to be the “essence” of reality, employing meditation, observation, and their own reasoning to find this essence. In each region, thinkers influenced each other, challenged each other, blended their ideas together, and created syntheses of ideas and standards of judging truth or falsehood. It was a revolution in human thinking, and it was to have massive consequences. It helped spawn the massive intellectual enterprise of science, which eventually was to transform the world and provide a systematic way of analyzing (within the limits of human ability) the nature of the reality with which humans were indirectly connected. But for most people, their own experience, and the role of authority continue to be paramount in their understanding of truth and falsehood, and that situation is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. They may respect philosophy and science, but they aren’t necessarily ready to accept their findings as the last words on an issue which most of them feel is connected to their eternal fate.

And then, there is the question that has, perhaps, caused more anguish and despair than any other: Why is there suffering? Often it is in our darkest and lowest times that we tend to ask this, when the issue of suffering is confronting us in the most direct and harrowing way possible.

In the chapter entitled, “Rebellion” in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s immortal The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers, Ivan, a depressed intellectual, is discussing with his brother Alyosha, a gentle, Christ-like Russian Orthodox monk, the question of why God allows suffering. In particular, Ivan is tormented by the issue of the suffering of children, and he inundates his brother with horrible details of atrocities and abuses committed against children, which he has collected in the form of newspaper clippings and other documentation. One of the cases of abuse Ivan shares with Alyosha is a particularly hideous one involving the barbaric treatment of a five year old girl by her own parents. Ivan explains that the little girl, while locked in a stinking, freezing outhouse in the winter, was heard praying to God, asking Him what she had done to make her parents punish her so terribly. Then he adds:

“Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and  the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, Alyosha, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could  not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why,  the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to ‘dear, kind God!’ I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But those little ones!...I am making you suffer, Alyosha. I’ll stop if you like.”

“Never mind. I want to suffer too,” muttered Alyosha.

Ivan speaks for many of us—and so does Alyosha. (It is a measure of Dostoyevsky’s intellectual integrity, by the way, that he, a Christian, was willing to throw the strongest and most emotionally wrenching case at his own belief system.) Almost all of us wonder why those who have done nothing wrong so often suffer so deeply and horribly. It seems to offend some very deeply embedded notion of fairness in us. It literally doesn’t make sense in our way of thinking. There is no justice in it. There is no proportion. The effect seems utterly disconnected to the cause. And when the victims of suffering are helpless, innocent children, our minds can come close to the breaking point if we dwell on it too long. Our natural sense of empathy for children, and our evolutionarily-conditioned protective instincts, are outraged by the pain and fear of “those little ones”. More broadly, we often wonder how a just and righteous God can look on such things, apparently, and do nothing. It is the ultimate problem for many religious believers, as they see not just children but all kinds of unoffending humans going through unspeakable tortures and devastating sickness. As one grows older, and there continues to be no apparent, predictable pattern that this suffering follows, our faith can be tested to its limits. Paradoxically, it is just such testing that can cause many to cling to their faith even more fervently: it is their last defense against the idea of a world of random, senseless, chaotic horror. Such people must believe that God or the Universe or the Supreme Intelligence has its reasons, and that someday the believers will understand those reasons. No other psychological position is tolerable for them.

The issue of suffering can be thought of as part of a broader question, and can indeed cause it to be asked: Why do evil and injustice exist? So often in history the brutal, the merciless, the cruel, and the morally indifferent have triumphed. So often the most terrible humans have lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully in their sleep while their countless victims had met their ends writhing in agony. So often the lawless and violent seem to prosper in life today, and barbarism is the norm in many, many places. (This may be part of the reason so many people want to believe in hell; they need to believe that the evil will be punished somehow, even if they escape the judgment of this world.) If God (or the Universe, or the Supreme Intelligence) is really the author of everything, is it the author of evil as well? Why does a purportedly all-powerful being even permit such a thing to exist? There is, in fact, an entire branch of theology devoted to this question, called theodicy. Religious thinkers have wrestled for centuries with the problem of evil. The best they have been able to do is to argue that God is so powerful that He or It can wrest good even out of apparent evil, or to argue that what seems evil to humans is not necessarily evil to a Being who has a plan for the evolution of the whole Universe. To many humans, such explanations are cold comfort, at best. Again, for their own mental well-being, they must believe that what is apparently evil has some larger purpose, and that in the end everything will make sense.