Can Being Justify Itself?
Answering the Fundamental Question of Philosophy
We are not at home in the world. There is a fundamental unease within us. This maddening current swelling under the familiarity of our conscious lives is the source of all our neuroses. Somehow we have knowledge of what ought to be, and yet what we confront in the world leaves us mortally dissatisfied. This ‘fundamental question of philosophy’ is not principally a question of suicide, as Camus put it, but rather a ruling on being, on whether or not being can justify itself. A number of existentialists have sought to answer this in defense of being. Nietzsche presented an escape into madness as a solution to absurdity; to abandon reason to art or religion. Camus felt it cowardly to try to escape the rationale that life is absurd, and deemed instead that one ought to accept the futility and pointlessness of it all and find meaning in raging against the dying of the light. Then in Kierkegaard, we find a way to transcend the paradox through what would be later described as a leap of faith.
But this question hides a deeper question still. It approaches the world as the problem — or our inability to accept the world as it is, which nonetheless we can say is the world’s problem for being so unacceptable. But is it that there something wrong with the world, or is it that there is something wrong with us? Dark clouds hang in the sky of existence, but what is worse than knowing what you see are clouds, is knowing that it is your eyes that are cloudy. Whatever darkness there is in the world, it is also found in us.
Our unease with the world stems from an unease with ourselves. It is not just that we are confronted by the unfathomability of being — that we have eaten of the apple and awakened to the knowledge of ourselves as distinct from nature, bringing with it both a sense of liberation and a crushing isolation — but that this isolation corrupts us. We are infected by a thought that makes us distrustful, terrified of ourselves. We imagined hell, not simply as a method to control others, but because there is something in us that is condemning us. This is the fear lurking under the fundamental question of philosophy: not simply that there is a problem with the world, but that it is we who are broken, that we have fallen from grace, that we have been rejected and are unable to find our way back home.
It is no accident then that salvation should be described as a reconciliation. Though the thinking mind can be seen as the source of all existential concerns (the chief of which is isolation, as the one that must be remedied before the others can come to matter) the solution must not be to abandon thinking, to lobotomize being in order to return to an undifferentiated oneness with nature, but to transcend separation through the creation of a new union: a connectedness that transcends notions of oneness and separateness. This idea of course is simply an abstraction, a rational understanding rather than an experiential knowing. We can’t think our way out of isolation; we can only feel our way back to connection. This is what is meant by gnosis — a knowing that surpasses understanding. The path of philosophy invariably leads to the experiential, and it is here that we can encounter reconciliation, and through which being is able to justify itself.
