Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Monday, February 14, 2022
THE COURAGE TO THINK FOR YOURSELF
Chapter I.
WHY PHILOSOPHY?
The Human Situation – The necessity of meaning in life – the
problematic nature of human existence – a thing that must be done by everyone –
to have a human life we must philosophize. To live is to find meaning in this
world and to decide what we shall be, what we shall believe, what we shall do
with the life given us.
“To sensitive spirits of all ages life is filled with cruel
contradictions and bitter ironies. Human experience is capricious and our
finite minds are not able to see enough of life at one time for us to know for
sure what is going on. We see only fragments of life and never the whole … Just under the surface of the active human
enterprise implicit in all we think and do there lies the eternal question:
What is the meaning of existence?”
J. S. Christian
Our life is a perennial surprise. The very fact that you
and I exist at all is a continual surprise. But there is more to it. This life
we are given, or are thrown into, is full of cruel contradictions and it does
not lack the element of tragedy. Only a complete fool can live or rather
vegetate and not see that we are appearing on the scene together with a host of
other beings of all sorts: the universe, completely unprepared. We are not told
beforehand that we are going to live. Nobody asks us whether we want it or not.
Thus we are ‘thrown into existence’ willy nilly to be always puzzled by this “thrownness
“and finally merge into the mystery of death. Mystery is our origin, mystery is our life
and mystery is our death.
From the Unknown we emerge, in an unknown we exist, and we go
into an unknown. We are given few moments of surprised existing only to
disappear into another sea of the mysterious past… Very soon we realize that we
are imprisoned in many ways. We are ‘boxed in’ for few moments of time
which is given to us – our lifespan. It is short and there is no escape from this prison of
time. We are also imprisoned in space, because we are body – whatever this
means – and every body is imprisoned in space. This spells our
limitations: very little time in little
space. We cannot do anything about it. We are doomed to be carried towards an
end and we do not even know when this end will come. As Heidegger would say,
we are “beings
unto death.” Our experiences are so short and limited that it seems to be
ridiculous to try to know, what is going on really. Then there are the
contradictions we face: our absolute
desire for “happiness”
and the cruel disappointments, the frustrations. We realize that the brief
moments of satisfaction leave us only thirstier, more dissatisfied. All our
dearest strivings are often smashed against the inexorable wall of suffering,
misunderstandings, cruelty of life and its transitoriness. Everything moves fast
in-between our fingers: we cannot catch any moment of our existence. It will
pass. So will we. The desire for more experience is denied. I have only this:
my few moments of my existence and no more. I live now at this time, in
this country, in this spot of the world. All this is given to me only once. I
do not have much to say here. This is the element of fate in my existence.
My awareness is limited, my mind is
limited, my knowledge
is painfully small, and my whole existence seems to
be a brief awakening to mystery without enough time or possibility to get a
closer look…
This is the riddle of my life. The basic fact of my thrownness
and brief co-existence with the world. The world will not let me rest for a while. I am
someone who sees and loves, hates and desires this world. I move within it, I
suffer it, I fight it… My life is given to me. It is finding myself in the
world for a little surprised awareness. I am carried by this mysterious
passing, which we call time, towards the unknown…
This wonderful surprise of my bare and puzzling existence.
This is my life. I am in it, I am it. I am my life. This is my human situation.
It is exciting and mysterious, it is painful and sweet, it is comical and also
tragic. It is wonderful, that is full of wonder! For yours and mine basic
experience is wonder and surprise! Everything is a problem for a human being.
Being what we are, we want to know. All men by nature
desire to know, said Aristotle many centuries ago. To be human means to
ask. A stone does not ask questions. It exists without knowing that it exists.
In a way of speaking it exists only for me, but not for itself.
It is radically different with humans. Enclosed in everything we
do, suffer or experience in any way whatever – at the very roots of
each moment of my existence – consciously or subconsciously there is the
eternal question of all humankind : What
is the meaning of existence?
A quite popular book now, written by V. E. Frankl, bears the
title: Man’s Search for Meaning. In this book the author relates his
life in Nazi
concentration
camps and summarizes his observations of men and women in those most
brutal and hellish camps ever designed by man for man’s victims. The basic
message and conclusion of Frankl’s life is that the search for meaning, the need
to have some meaning, is the most central and absolutely first and basic need
in every human being. Perhaps the best description of man is > a searcher
for meaning <. Give some meaning to human life and men will gladly give
their lives for it, but take away this assurance of meaning of man’s existence
and man must commit suicide, go insane, degenerate slowly and die anyway.
This is true for every human life. Anything we do or suffer is done or suffered
because it is somehow meaningful or seems to contain meaning for us. Without
this belief in meaning of our lives there is no real human existence. This
quest for meaning can be expressed in many ways but all of them can be reduced
to the search for worth, importance, value of life.
“Is life worth living? What is the end of it all?” Without
meaning man cannot survive and conversely, he will endure almost anything
including torture,
sufferings, humiliation and death as long as he sees some meaning in it.
“To lose one’s life is a little thing and I shall have the
courage to do so if it is necessary, but to see the meaning of this life
dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable. One
cannot live without meaning.”
Albert Camus
The absolute demand for meaning in life is so basic and strong
that those who experience an existential vacuum, that is blindness to meaning
of life, can think of only one thing:
suicide. The awareness that life should be without meaning cannot be
accepted seriously.
Man as the wondering seeker for Truth
- 1. Connection. Philosophy is a personal search for the meaning of human existence. Beneath any question, a human being may ask, the question of the meaning of human life in the world is hidden and implied. Socrates gave the gist of the origin of the philosophical unrest and wonder when he said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Since man is essentially a question he cannot answer, he cannot stop questioning and searching
Sunday, February 13, 2022
The Atheist Delusion Prof.Leszek Figurski
The Atheist Delusion. www.dpl21.com
