The Covid-19 pandemic has offered people an opportunity to reflect on deeper questions. Philosophy should be understood as a manner of living and not just an exercise done in an armchair or a classroom writes Dr Philip Gonzales
It is often said that philosophy deals with the deepest human realities such as birth and death and this is, indeed, true. Moreover, it is also true, as Socrates famously said, that an unexamined life is a life not worth living. What then would a life look like that is no longer interested in the questions of birth and death? And, further, what kind of human life would one have that no longer examines life’s meaning in the time between birth and dying, the time of our only sojourn within this world? To ask these kinds of questions is to philosophise because philosophy deals with profound human truths and this is why to be human is to be a metaphysical animal. Humans irrevocably live within these borders and thus must think questions of the border, the borders of life and death, of what lies before and what lies beyond. All questions of borders are metaphysical or ultimate questions. To fail to ask such questions is to shirk the task of being a metaphysical animal, a shirking which is indifferent to the distinguishing marks of what makes us human questioning animals in the first place and such a life, as Socrates saw long ago, is a life no longer worth living and has lost its salt and existential flavour.
What I propose here is by no means to answer these life defining questions but rather to simply reflect upon and examine these abiding questions. In doing, one enters into these questions thereby seeing how they are human questions and not just questions of specialists or academics. Here it is important to remember that philosophy should be understood as a way of life and a manner of living and not just an exercise done in an armchair or classroom.
Facts
One of the strangest facts about our human existence is that not one of us ever asked to be born. None of us — thank goodness — were there presiding over our parents’ passionate embrace asking to be conceived on the day or night of our conception. The choice, via the sexual embrace of our parents, was thrust upon us. We had no say about the most fundamental event of our life, that is, our very entrance into existence, the womb and our subsequent birth onto the stage of this world. Nor can we avoid death and choose to live forever on this earth. Despite how healthy we eat, how much we exercise, how far technology and medicine may advance we are still subject to the law of human mortality. The supple and fresh flesh of the infant turns into the beauty, vitality and maturity of adulthood which turns into the time-worn wrinkles of the human face and body in its old age. No machine and no technology, however great, can stop this cycle of human life, of birth and dying and the time in-between. These human, all-too-human mysteries of birth and death are beyond our control and this is what it means to be human, finite, contingent and not divine.
Yet, surely what is in our power as humans is, in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “…not go gentle into that good night,” understood here as the deep human need to actively reflect and examine the meaning of our birth and life before we pass over the border into that ‘good night’. Indeed, we are allowed – no rather compelled – to ask those fundamental questions of human existence: ‘who am I?’, ‘why are we here?’, ‘what is the meaning of it all and is there any meaning?’, ‘am I/we free?’, ‘what comes before birth and is there life after death?’, ‘what are we meant to do with the time given us on this brief stay on earth and what is my place in the human family?’. These are but some of the great pressing questions of human life and thus of philosophy.
To wonder at, to be puzzled and perplexed by, our entrance into existence and are our fast-approaching exit of death is to be pressed between birth and death. Between birth and death is our short appearance on the stage of human life. What do we do on this dramatic stage, how to we live, what do we desire and love? Is it not true that where our heart is there also is our treasure? What we love thus reveals who we are. A human life that no longer struggles with such questions exists upon the human stage as a kind of unreflective prop that fails to be pressed by urgent and ultimate metaphysical questions. Here human life is reduced to a fated tragedy of inaction and non-participation. Such a life is no longer worth living and this is why the French atheist philosopher Camus saw that the philosophical question is the question of suicide.
Consumption
Our current fetishising of consumption exhibited in our ‘throw-away culture’ (Pope Francis) mutes such pressing human and metaphysical questions. In such as a world, to paraphrase Thoreau, people live lives of quiet desperation. In such a world, philosophy must shake people free from the lethargy and tragedy of a unreflective life awakening them to the pressing questions of birth and death and our time on the stage between these two borders in which the urgency and ultimacy of fundamental human metaphysical questions are raised. Christian philosophy has never been afraid of such deep human questioning because to raise such questions is to participate and perform our humanity and this humanity that lives between birth and death is the ground in which faith and grace are incarnated. Catholics and Christians are more obliged than others to philosophise so as to understand our humanity in which grace and faith are incarnated. In doing, we stay awake on the stage of life and history pressed for time to do everything within our conceivable power to live as we should in a reflective life that shows we will ‘not go gently into that good night’ thereby showing that our lives have not lost the saltiness and flavour of existential urgency; for what we love reveals who we are.
Dr Philip John Paul Gonzales is a lecturer in philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. This article is part of a regular column where philosophers from Maynooth Drs Gonzales and Gaven Kerr offer accessible introductory thoughts on perennial themes in the history of philosophy and the Catholic tradition.