THOUGHTS ON LIFE AND HUMAN
EXISTENCE
To Western philosophy
the
dignity of our existence and life is in our thought.
But this isn't the position of Buddhism and Oriental philosophy.
And modern thinking also equates the question of our existence
and life in a rather different way, stressing the contradictions
present in our lives.
The wise man in Oriental philosophy
The wise man, to most oriental philosophy, is the one who is
able to pull the feelings out of himself. He is the one who
deserts society, who locks himself in his own I - living a life
which in western culture might be classified as vegetative.
The wise man in Greek and Roman thought
In the Roman empire the stoic philosophers (Seneca,
Cicero...) also defended the
mastery of our negative passions, feelings and thoughts, and the
surpassing of the I as a pathway to overcome and to avoid
unhappiness. But they never proposed – as in the Orient - the
vacuum of ideas and feelings.
There is, in the west, a powerful tradition of questioning
thought, which superimposes itself in the idea that
interrogating the future and life can be a source of
unhappiness. Socrates proclaimed it emphatically: “An unexamined
life is not worth living“.
The dignity of our life and existence is in our thought and
questioning
Our dignity, to western philosophy, is in our thought. «Even if
the mind is a disease, even if humanity is a misfortune,
this illness and this misfortune are ours – for they are us, and
we exist only through them» (Andre Comte-Sponville).
And exactly because western thought opted on questioning, the
views and reflexions about our existence and the meaning of life
are much more varied and rich than those produced in the Orient.
After the long mediaeval interregnum, after the Renaissance,
when western thinking began to loose its religious accent,
existential thinking experienced a renewal of strength, all the
more since modern science was introducing new elements about our
position in the Cosmos.
Thoughts such as those of Pascal in the eighteenth century about
the nature of our lives, and our position in the Universe, are
particularly contemporary, and undoubtedly influenced by
scientific revelations. «There is no reason why I am here rather
than there, or why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By
whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted
to me?» (Pensees (Penguin Classics)
)
Pessimistic thoughts on human life and existence
Though the Renaissance produced optimistic views about life,
certain existential pessimism, familiar to ancient thought,
persists. And we can easily understand why. The vision of life
that science gives is far from reassuring. The Cosmos revealed
by science is too big, and man just an insignificant thing in
it.
This disenchanted and pessimistic vision grew with
Charles Darwin’s
conceptions, revealing that after all man hasn’t a special place
in the net of living beings; that we are not the exceptional,
supernatural, or rational beings, in the shade of God, we
thought we were.
Hence, the proliferation of negative thoughts about our
insignificance and the nothingness of our existence, retaking
new foundations and thoughts already expressed in ancient
literature, philosophy, the Bible and other religious texts.
Contemporary thoughts on human existence: humour concerning
our contradictory lives
Where contemporary thought is rather different from the
ancient, is in a certain mordance and humour concerning our
lives and the contradictions we introduce in them. Contemporary
thought points out a theatrical element, associated with the way
we live. Writers such as Shakespeare had already introduced
these elements… but they are now carried out to new extremes,
reflecting present features…
«Life is a cabaret, old chum… Welcome to the cabaret». «Life is
just one damn thing after another». «There are two tragedies in
life: one is not to get your heart's desire, the other is to get
it».
These are typical contemporary existential thoughts, connected
to the awareness of the contradictions present in our souls, to
the contradictions that exist between our immortal dreams and
our mortal condition; to the dichotomy detectable between real
life and the dreamed one – realities already sensed in the past
but only expressed in a radical way and without auto-censorship
in the present.
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See also:
Thoughts and Quotes on Life and
Human Existence
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