Humanity’s Favorite Unawareness

Our theories will go awry, will all throw dust in our eyes,
unless we dare to confront not only the world but the soul as
well, and begin to be amazed at our lack of amazement in be-
ing alive, at our taking life for granted.
      Confronting the soul is an intellectual exposure that tears
open the mind to incalculable questions, the answers to which
are not easily earned. A modern person, therefore, believes that
their security lies in refraining from raising such issues. Ultimate
questions have become the object of their favorite unawareness.
Since the dedication to tangible matters is highly rewarded,
they do not care to pay attention to imponderable issues and
prefer to erect a tower of Babel on the narrow basis of deeper
unawareness.
      Unawareness of the ultimate is a possible state of mind as
long as a person finds tranquillity in their deification to partial ob-
jectives. But when the tower begins to totter, when death
wipes away that which seemed mighty and independent, when
in evil days the delights of striving are replaced by the night-
mare of futility, they become conscious of the peril of evasive-
ness, of the emptiness of small objectives. Their apprehension
lest in winning small prizes they did not gamble their life away,
throws their soul open to questions there were trying to avoid.

The Meaning of Existence

But what is there at stake in human life that may be gambled
away? It is the meaning of life. In all acts they perform, a person
raises a claim to meaning. The trees they plant, the tools they in-
vent, are answers to a need or a purpose. In its very essence,
consciousness is a dedication to design. Committed to the task
of coalescing being with meaning, things with ideas, the mind
is driven to ponder whether meaning is something it may
invent and invest, something which ought to be attained, or
whether there is meaning to existence as it is, to existence as
existence, independent of what we may add to it. In other
words, is there only meaning to what a person does 
but none to what they are? Becoming conscious of themselves they do not stop at
knowing: “I am”, they are driven to know “what” they are. A person may,
indeed, be characterized as a subject in quest of a predicate, as
a being in quest of a meaning of life, of all of life, not only of
particular actions or single episodes which happen now and
then.
      Meaning denotes a condition that cannot be reduced to a
material relation and grasped by the sense organs. Meaning is
compatibility with an idea, it is, furthermore, that which a fact
is for the sake of something else; the pregnancy of an object
with value. Life is precious to a human. But is it precious to them
alone? Or is someone else in need of it?

The Ultimate Surmise

Imbedded in the mind is a certainty that the state of existence
and the state of meaning stand in a relation to each other,
that life is assessable in terms of meaning. The will to meaning
and the certainty of the legitimacy of our striving to ascertain
it are as intrinsically human as the will to live and the cer-
tainty of being alive.
      In spite of failures and frustrations, we continue to be
haunted by that irrepressible quest. We can never accept the
idea that life is hollow and incompatible with meaning.
      If at the root of philosophy is not a self-contempt of the
mind but the mind’s concern for its ultimate surmise, then
our aim is to examine in order to know. Seeking contentment
in a brilliant subterfuge, we are often ready to embezzle the
original surmise. But why should we even care to doubt, if
we cease to surmise? Philosophy is what humanity dares to do with
its ultimate surmise of meaning in existence.
      Animals are content when their needs are satisfied, a human in-
sists not only in being satisfied but also on being able to
satisfy, on being a need  not only on having needs. Personal
needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed?
There is no person who has not been moved by that anxiety.

A Person Is Not an End for Themselves

It is a most significant fact that a person is not sufficient to themselves,
that life is not meaningful to them unless it is serving an end
beyond itself, unless it is of value to someone else. The self
may have the highest rate of exchange, yet people do not live
by currency alone, but by the good attainable in expending
it. To hoard the self is to grow a colossal sense for the futility 
of living.
      A person is not an all-inclusive end to themselves. The second maxim
of Kant, never to use human beings merely as means but to
regard them also as ends, only suggests how a person ought
to be treated by other people, not how they ought to treat them-
selves. For if a person thinks they are an end to themselves, then
they will use others as means. Moreover, if the idea of a person being
an end is to be taken as a true estimate of their worth, they cannot
be expected to sacrifice their life or their interests for the good of
someone else or even of a group. They must treat themselves the 
way they expect others to treat them. Why should even a group
or a whole people be worth the sacrifice of one’s life? To a
person who regards themselves as an absolute end a thousand
lives will not be worth more than their own life.
      Sophisticated thinking may enable a person to feign their being
sufficient to themselves. Yet the way to insanity is paved with
such illusions. The feeling of futility that comes with the sense
of being useless, of not being needed in the world, is the most
common cause of psychoneurosis. The only way to avoid
despair is to be a need rather than an end. Happiness, in fact,
may be defined as the certainty of being needed But who is
in need of a person?

Does a Person Exist for the Sake of Society?

The first answer that comes to mind is a social one—a person’s
purpose is to serve society or humankind. The ultimate worth
of a person would then be determined by their usefulness to
others, by the efficiency of their social work. Yet, in spite of their
instrumentalist attitude, a person expects others to take them not
for what they may mean to them but as a being valuable in them-
selves. Even they who do not regard themself as an absolute end,
rebel against being treated as a means to an end, as subservient
to other people. The rich of the world, want to be loved
for their own sake, for their essence, whatever it may mean, not
for their achievements or possessions. Nor do the old and sick
expect help because of what they may give us in return. Who
needs the old, the incurably sick, the maintenance of whom
is a drain on the treasury of the state? It is, moreover, obvious
that such service does not claim all of one’s life and can there-
fore not be the ultimate answer to their quest of meaning for
life as a whole. A person has more to give than what other people are
able or willing to accept. To say that life could consist of
care for others of incessant service to the world, would be a vul-
gar boast. What we are able to bestow upon others is usually 
less and rarely more than a tithe.
      There are alleys in the soul where a person walks alone, ways
that do not lead to society, a world of privacy that shrinks
from the public eye. Life comprises not only arable, produc-
tive land, but also mountains of dreams, an underground of
sorrow, towers of yearning, which can hardly be utilized to
the last for the good of society, unless a person be converted 
into a machine in which every screw must serve a function or be
removed. It is a profiteering state which, trying to export the
individual, asks all of a person for itself.
      And if society as embodied in the state should prove to be
corrupt and my effort to cure its evil unavailing, would my
life as an individual have been totally void of meaning? If so-
ciety should decide to reject my services and even place me in
solitary confinement, so that I will surely die without being
able to bequeath any influence to the world I love, will I then
feel compelled to end my life?
      Human existence cannot derive its ultimate meaning from
society, because society itself is in need of meaning. It is as
legitimate to ask: Is humanity needed?—as it is to ask: Am I
needed?
      Humanity begins in the individual person, just as history takes
its rise from a singular event. It is always one person at a time
whom we keep in mind when we pledge: “with malice toward
none, with charity for all,” or when trying to fulfill: “Love
thy neighbor as thyself.” The term, “humanity” which in bi-
ology denotes the human species, has an entirely different
meaning in the realm of ethics and religion. Here humanity is
not conceived as a species, as an abstract concept, stripped
from its concrete reality, but as an abundance of specific in-
dividuals, as a community of persons rather than as a herd or
a multitude of nondescripts.
      While it is true that the good of all counts more than the
good of one, it is the concrete individual who lends meaning
to the human race. We do not think that a human being is val-
uable because they are a member of the race; it is rather the op-
posite: the human race is valuable because it is composed of
human beings.
       While dependent on society as well as on the air that sus-
tains us, and while other people compose the system of relations
in which the curve of our actions takes its course, it is as in-
dividuals that we are beset with desires, fears and hopes, chal-
lenged, called upon and endowed with the power of will and
a spark of responsibility.

The Self-Annihilation of Desire

Of all phenomena which take place in the soul, desires have the
highest rate of mortality. Like aquatic plants, they grow and
live in the waters of oblivion, impatiently eager to vanish. In-
herent in desire is the intention to expire; it asserts itself in or-
der to be quenched, and in attaining satisfaction it comes to
an end, singing its own dirge.
      Such suicidal intention is not vested in all human acts.
Thoughts, concepts, laws, theories are born with the intent
to endure. A problem, for example, does not cease to be rele-
vant when its solution is achieved. Inherent in reason is the
intention to endure, a striving to comprehend the valid, to
form concepts the cogency of which goes on for ever. It is,
therefore, not in pondering about ideas, but in surveying one’s
inner life and discovering the graveyard of needs and desires,
once fervently cherished, that we become intimately aware of
the temporality of existence.

 The Quest of the Lasting

Yet, there is a curious ambiguity in the way in which this aware-
ness is entertained. For while there is nothing a person is more in-
timately sure of than the temporality of existence, they are rarely
resigned to the role of a mere undertaker of desires.
      Walking upon a rock that is constantly crumbling away be-
hind every step and anticipating the inevitable abruption which
will end this walk, a person cannot restrain their bitter yearning to
know whether life is nothing but a series of momentary physio-
logical and mental processes, actions and forms of behavior, a
flow of vicissitudes, desires and sensations, running like grains
through an hourglass, marking time only once and always van-
ishing.
      They wonder whether, at the bottom, life is not like the face
of the sundial, outliving all shadows that rotate upon its sur-
face. Is life nothing but a medley of facts, unrelated to one
another; chaos camouflaged by illusion?

 The Helpless Craving

There is not a soul on this earth which, however vaguely or
rarely, has not realized that life is dismal if not mirrored in
something which is lasting. We are all in search of a convic-
tion that there is something which is worth the toil of living.
There is not a soul which has not felt a craving to know of
something that outlasts life, strife and agony.
      Helpless and incongruous is a person with all their craving, with
their tiny candles in the mist. Is it their will to be good that would
heal the wounds of their soul, their fright and frustration? It is too
obvious that their will is a door to a house divided against itself,
that their good intentions, after enduring for a while, touch the
mud of vanity, like the horizons of their life which some day will
touch the grave. Is there anything beyond the horizon of our
good intentions?
      A person’s quest for a meaning of existence is essentially a quest
for the lasting, a quest for abidingness. In a sense, human life
is often a race against time, going through efforts to perpetuate
experiences, attaching itself to values or establishing relations
that do not perish at once. Their quest is not a product of de-
sire but an essential element of their nature, characteristic not
only of their mind but also of their very existence. This can be
shown by analyzing the structure of existence as such.

What is Existence?

While existence as a general category remains indefinable, it
is directly known to us and, in spite of its indefinability, not
entirely out of relation to the mind. It is not an empty concept,
since even as a most general category it cannot be completely
divested of some relations. There is always a minimum of mean-
ing in our notion of existence.
      The most intrinsic characteristic of existence is independ-
ence. What exists does so in reality, in time and space, not
only in our minds. In ascribing existence to a person, we imply
that the person is more than a mere word, name or idea, that
they exist independent of us and our thinking, while that which
is a product of our imagination, like the chimerical Brobding-
nags or the Yahoos, depends entirely on our mind; it is non-
existent when we do not think of it. However, existence thus
described is a negative concept which tells us what existence is
not and places it out of relation to us. But what is the posi-
tive content of existence? Does not existence imply a neces-
sary relation to something beyond itself?
      
The Temporality of Existence

It is obvious that the relation of existence to time is more in-
timate and unique than its relation to space. There is nothing
in space which is so necessary to existence, or belongs so in-
timately to it, that we could not abandon it without incurring
any radical harm. Existence implies no possession of property,
no mastery over other beings. Even the particular position we
occupy in space we can freely exchange for another one, while
the years of our lives are of absolute importance to us. Time
is the only property the self really owns. Temporality, there-
fore, is an essential feature of existence.
      Time, however, is the most flimsy of things: a mere succes-
sion of perishing instants. It is something we never hold: the
past is gone forever, what is yet to come is beyond our reach,
and the present departs before we can perceive it. How para-
doxical and true—the only property we own we never possess.

The Uninterruptness of Existence

The temporality or evanescence of existence is, indeed, pain-
fully obvious to all of us. Caught in the mortal stream of time,
which permits us neither to abide in the present nor to return
to any moment of the past, the only prospect we constantly
face is that of ceasing to exist, of being thrown out of the
stream. Yet, is it temporality alone that is intrinsic to existence? 
Is not permanence, to some degree, just as intrinsic to it?
Existence implies duration, continuity. Existence is uninter-
ruptedness, not a year now and a year then, dispersion, but
continuous extension. Relative and limited as life’s uninter-
ruptedness may be, it is, like temporality, one of the two con-
stituitive characteristics of existence.
      There is an element of constancy in the inner structure of
existence which accounts for permanence within temporality,
as it is the enduring aspect of reality which alone is capable
of being an object of logical judgment. For only that aspect
of a thing which is constant and which remains the same, inde-
pendent of the changes which the thing itself undergoes, can
be grasped by the categories of our reason. In other words, our
categories are the mirrors, in which the things are reflected
in the light of their constancy. There is nothing which the
mind esteems more than abidingness. We measure values by
their endurance.
      Even our consciousness of time depends upon a principle
that is independent of time. We are conscious of time by meas-
uring it, by saying a minute, an hour, a day. Yet in order to
measure time, we must be in possession of a principle of meas-
urement which is taken to be constant. We cannot measure it
by directly comparing one stretch of time with another, for
two parts of time are never given at once. Thus, time itself
cannot yield a consciousness of itself, for in order to be a
consciousness of itself it would have to be equally present at
all stages of time. Consciousness of time, therefore, presup-
poses a principle that is not temporal and does not, like each
instant, vanish to give birth to the next one. Time itself de-
pends for its continuation on a principle that is independent
of time, for time itself could not yield permanence. The stream
of time flows along a “no time’s land.”
 
The Secret of Existence

It is in this relation with temporality to abidingness that the se-
cret of existence resides. For whether we attempt to explain,
for example, organic living by postulating a mysterious “vital
force” or by physio-chemical laws exclusively, the basic
question remains unanswered: What makes the force or those
laws endure? Is the driving force of living the will to live?
But the will itself is subject to change. Obviously, there must
be some permanent principle that gives duration to the will.
If so, what is the relation of the will to live to that principle?
Moreover, is it true that existence is the result of a deliberate
decision? Does my organism grow, multiply and develop be-
cause it wants to? Are the urge, endeavor, daring and ad-
venture which characterize life the result of choice? If so, we
are not aware of it. We know, on the contrary, that human
will never creates life. In generating life, we are the tools not
the masters. We are witnesses rather than authors of birth and
death. We know that something animates and inspires a living
organism. But what? To use the concept of a subconscious will
to live, of a will that we do not know ourselves, is like employ-
ing a deux ex machina, the device whereby in ancient drama a
god was brought to the stage to provide a supernatural solution
to a dramatic difficulty, with the difference, however, that here
the deus appears in disguise, claiming to be a natural being.
      What is the lasting in our own lives? What remains con-
stant through all changes? The body grows and decays, the
passions all flow down the stream of oblivion. What does a
person, looking back on the threshold of death, consider lasting
in all that has happened and passed? Is it our will to live? Our
reflective concern?

In Being We Obey

Looking at our own existence, we are forced to admit that the
essence of existence is not in our will to live; we must live, and
in living we obey. Existence is a compliance, not a desire; an
agreement, not an impulse. In being we obey.
      We struggle, suffer, live and act, not because we have the
will to. Our will itself is obedience, an answer, a compliance.
It is only subsequently that we get to will what we must; the
will is appearance, our compliance—“the thing in itself.” Is
not the life of a body a process of obedience. What is think-
ing, if not submission to truth, compliance with the rules of
logic? For the fact that there is logic, independent of wishful
thinking, exercising over our minds coercive, implacable
power is unexplainable as a product of the will or mind. The
acts of logical thinking are the mind’s, but that there must be
logic at all, that the mind cannot but think in accordance to
its rules, is not the mind’s.

The Ultimate Goal

We have characterized a person’s quest for a meaning of existence
as a quest for the lasting, and have shown that the relation to
the lasting is at the root of all existence. Yet the natural piety
of obedience is no answer to a person’s quest. For while a person is at-
tached to the lasting at the root of their being, they are, as we stated
above, detached and uncurbed in their thoughts and deeds; they
are free to act and free to refrain; they have the power to disobey.
It is because of their being independent that they are haunted by a
fear of their life being irrelevant and by a will to ultimate meaning.
      Every human being harbors a craving for the lasting, yet
few of us comprehend the meaning of the lasting. There is
only one truth but there are many ways of misunderstanding
it. There is only one goal, but there are many ways of missing it.
      What is the ultimate goal? The prolongation of existence in
its present form with its pleasures and cares? The perpetuation
of the self with its languor, vanity and fear? We do not love
the totality of the ego to such a degree that our highest aspira-
tions should be to preserve it forever. In fact, we begin to brood
about immortality in our anxiety about the perpetuation of
others rather than in an anxiety about the perpetuation of our
own selves. The thought of immortality begins in compassion,
in a transitive concern for those who have been taken away.
      The true aspiration is not that self and all that is contained
in it may last, but that all the self stands for may last. Humanity can
be a nightmare but also a fulfillment of a vision of God. It has
been given the power to surpass themselves; to answer for all things
and to act for one God. All beings obey the law; humanity is able to
sing the law. Humanity’s ultimate legacy is in its composing a song of
deeds which only God fully understands.

Time and Eternity

The way to the lasting does not lie on the other side of life;
it does not begin where time breaks off. The lasting begins not
beyond but within time, within the moment, within the con-
crete. Time can be seen from two aspects: from the aspect of
temporality and from the aspect eternity.
      Time is the border of eternity. Time is eternity formed into
tassels. The moments of our lives are like luxuriant tassels.
They are attached to the garment and are made of the same
cloth. It is through spiritual living that we realize that the in-
finite can be confined in a measured line.
      Life without integrity is like loosely hanging threads, easily
straying from the main cloth, while in acts of piety we learn
to understand that every instant is like a thread raveling out
of eternity to form a delicate tassel. We must not cast off the
threads but weave them into the design of an eternal fabric.
      The days of our lives are representatives of eternity rather
than fugitives, and we must live as if the fate of all of time
would totally depend on a single moment.
      Seen as temporality, the essence of time is detachment, iso-
lation. A temporal moment is always alone, always exclusive.
Two instants can never be together, never contemporary. Seen
as eternity, the essence of time is attachment, communion. It is
within time rather than with space that we are able to com-
mune, to worship, to love. It is within time that one day may
be worth a thousand years.
      Creative insights grow a life-time to last a moment, and yet
they last for ever. For to last means to commune with God, “to
cleave unto Him” (Deuteronomy 11:22). A moment has no
contemporary with temporality. But within eternity every
moment can become a contemporary of God.
      This is why we said above that the good is an ontological
fact. Love, for example, is more than co-operation, more than
feeling and acting together. Love is being together, a mode of
existence, not only a state of the soul.
      The psychological aspect of love, its passion and emotion, is
but an aspect of an ontological situation. When a human loves
another human they enter a union which is more than an addition, more 
than one plus one. To love is to attach oneself to the spirit of
unity, to rise to a new level, to enter a new dimension, a spirit-
ual dimension. For, as we have seen, whatever a person does to
a person, they also do to God.
      Significantly, the Bible describes love in the following way:
“Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God with all thy heart, with 
all thy soul, with all thy meod. What does meod. mean? It
can only mean what it means everywhere in the Bible: the
adverb “very,” “much,” in a superlative degree. In trying to
qualify the verb “to love” the text was suddenly short of ex-
pression. Progressively it states: “with all thy heart.” And even
more: with all thy soul. But even that was not sufficiently ex-
pressed until it said: with all thy veriness…