LIFEBOAT REALITIES, ETHICAL DILEMMAS

and a Science of Existentiality

by Hugh M. Lewis

it is the persuasive power of ritual and myth to render 'as if normal' any event, experience, feeling of expectation which might otherwise be threatening, harmful, upsetting or 'unusual'. The critical presence of myth and ritual can bring into the center of the 'normal range' of human experience virtually any phenomena however seemingly strange; its critical absence can cause anything however previously familiar to become unfamiliar and 'estranged' from the 'normal' field of human sensitivity and sensibility. On the morning of their departure, Jewish mothers did their children's laundry in everyday manner without any illusions about the destiny that awaited them and their families in the death camps. A Catholic mother, in emotional shock over her son's sudden untimely death, fails to go through the proper funerary rituals and for years afterward still keeps his ashes in a coffee can in his bedroom closet. The presence of myth and ritual helps to frame our everyday experiences, providing them with contexts of understanding, interpretation, emotional expression and social response and relation. Its absence may result in anomie, meaning loss, disorientation and disordered behavior. Religion, whether 'primitive' or 'civilized' provides a great organizing force in the daily lives of many people, conferring a sense of purpose, a reason for being, a center of focus and a direction for becoming in the face of many uncontrollable events. The lack of such a guiding principle in one's daily life can be the source of much discomfort, chaos and confusion. And this is true of any kind of religious orientation, whatever its basic differences and local details.

We do not normally dissect and analyze the many aspects and components of our everyday existences in the way a normal scientist might try to do. Life normally presents itself in a full blown, 'as is' and undifferentiated way. It is usually only in hindsight of our own mistakes and successes that we can sit down and reflect freely upon experience and its 'as if' possibilities, no longer constrained by the force of its existential immediacy and sense of urgency. Our understanding, our wisdom, our insight is always derived after the fact of our previous experience of reality. Whatever our calculus of possible consequences, whatever our competence in 'making things go our way' we can never completely know beforehand or control the eventualities which inevitably happen to us. This simple, inexorable reality, however plain and unadorned, renders all our scientific efforts at prediction and control a pretentious impossibility. And we can neither ever 'explain' in any final or complete way 'why' or even 'what' it is that happens to us. We come to rely upon our religion to do this for us, and if it fails us, we then look for answers in the errors of our religious beliefs and practices. And not being able to satisfactorily explain our own experiences to ourselves, how then can we presume without pretension to know what is true for anyone else's existence, especially when individual differences and the inherent complexities of our realities provides very little common ground upon which to build such an understanding. Again we fall back upon our religion as the foundation for our common and shared realities. And when the earth shakes these foundations, we look for the weaknesses and fault lines within and between ourselves, attempting to reinforce our foundation by piling more stones on top of stone.

In its absolute finality and irreversibleness, Death is the ultimate existential constraint which predetermines our lives. Death is the human universal, a fact with the kind of undeniability upon which to construct a science about the realities of human existence. This applies with equal, unequivocal force in the existence of every human being--it is the consequence the occurrence of which cannot be questioned or second guessed. And yet death itself is nothing more than the existential ground of life--the 'groundless ground' which simultaneous creates and destroys meaning in existence--whether we are rich or poor, American or aborigine, normal or insane. Life in relation to death becomes but a thin, transparent veil which we drape over our bodies. Death in relation to life becomes merely the final loss of breadth. So who among us will feign to have the final answers?

The eventual factuality of death informs our religions in ways that it does not inform any of our sciences. The eschatology and theodicy of our religion provides another 'existential' kind of horizon for our 'positive' factualism of scientific understanding, a kind of horizon of our common experiences beyond which our science is strictly taboo.

And yet death, though it may the last one, is not the only constraining 'parameter' of a science of human existence. There are the infinite small 'deaths' which presage our final passage and which continually transform and moderate us into both cowards and courageous heroes, which desensitize our naïve and innocent illusions and sensitize us to the 'eternal verities' of our common predicament, and which render us apathetic and empathetic to the condition, suffering and happiness of others.

Life and its timing itself exerts a constraining and liberating force as we grow older. Age becomes the measure of opportunities lost and forgotten, hopes and expectations dashed and misbegotten. With age our opportunities and chances become played out, winners and losers alike, and we must learn to face our existential predicament, to come to terms with the lot we have been cast, however grand or humble. We sense with the passage of time the 'diminishing degrees of freedom' and with the fleeting of experience the irretrievable loss of potential and innocence.

Then there is that fundamental sense of loneliness and separation which we can never quite completely overcome. Whatever its source in our existence, the most we can find is temporary escape from the feeling of its incompleteness. Rooted perhaps in the irreducible and irreconcilable uniqueness of our existential condition, in the unique 'loneliness' of our individual being, it presents us with a pervasive but ineffable sense that 'something is missing' and results in a need for fulfillment which can be the primary driving force through our lives.

Perhaps a related feeling is a fundamental sense of unsatisfactoriness in the understanding of life, the longing to learn the 'truth' and the eventual realization that there really are no final bottom lines except the ones we make for ourselves with our religions and try to impose upon others.

Another similar feeling is one of a pervasive, never ending sense of vicariosness about our daily existence, characterizing the romance of youth, and one which we are always trying to outlive and unlearn or else quest after like 'El Dorado'. And this essential vicariousness is not necessarily a function of our relative unhappiness or frustrated expectations. Though these feelings may exaggerate it, the feeling remains a byproduct and a symptom of our basic lack of meaning, or rather, our basic human sentience which allows us the capacity to imagine ourselves as if we were others; to feel what they feel; to walk in their shoes.

Not all of our existential concerns which preoccupy our lives are necessarily negative 'constraints' which prevent us from our human fulfillment. There are other kinds of things we can look to as fundamental about our common existence which are positively values and which give us hope for our future. One such thing is the fact that though we live and die alone, we were not born alone. We come into a social world which teaches us some sense of responsibility beyond ourselves. Though the basic fact of our social existence may more often than not seem as a constraint upon our freedom, as we mature we pass from a convenient world of selfishness into a relatively genuine one of selflessness, in which 'unencumbered' satisfaction can be found in helping and giving to others for their own sake--real meaning and fulfillment is to fond through our fulfillment of social obligations which define our existence.

Giving birth and bringing a child into the world, the bonding and love that grows between parent and child is an experience rooted in our social existence which transcends our own narrow sense of death. Related to procreation is the fact of human creativeness itself, the capacity for bringing 'life' into the world through a poem, a painting or the performance of a play. And then there is the fact of human sentience itself, and the common need for 'enlightenment' which, by whatever religious pathway, always leads to the same common ground or human emancipation, however relative and ephemeral.

Then there is the evasive emancipation of 'embracing the moment'--of the immediate experience of existence in a manner which may be described as a 'heightened state of consciousness'. It is a kind of phenomenological meaning inhering in the experience of existence itself, a joy of being alive which can be projected into our future and cast back upon the past. It is constituted by the many small happiness and petty truths which ease the way, and transcend tragedy by a resolute sense of humor.

A science of human existentiality does not begin or end on the same ground as a 'normal' science. Rational science seeks to discover 'truth' from many lesser 'truths' but human 'truth' and human reality, though overlapping domains of human experience, remain separable and separated. A science of human existentiality seeks human reality within the many everyday 'realities'. Where 'normal' science begins and ends with the premises and quest for 'certainty' a science of human existentiality begins and ends upon the ground of universal uncertainty. A science of existentiality seeks to know the ways that many people make sense of this existential uncertainty, in a way that helps them to cope with uncertainty. Rather than being a 'normal science' it becomes a 'science' of 'abnormality'--focusing upon the critical disjunctures and conjunctures when the seamless fabric of existence folds upon itself and rends apart to uncover the 'grounded groundlessness' just beneath the surface. It is during these focal points of human existence that human realities (and the reality of being human) exposes itself disinvested of the many 'truths' which normally 'cover it over'.

For most of humankind, time immemorial, human reality has been the reality of the lifeboat--a reality in which existential constraints upon survival dictate a pathos, ethos and nomos of human belief and behavior quite different than 'normal' everyday realities we've grown so accustomed to. And a science of human truth whose 'normal' practices are found primarily within an exceptionally affluent society, whose practitioners are relatively free from the ethical dilemmas of lifeboat realities, cannot be expected to be able to face, come to terms with, and learn to cope with such lifeboat realities in any reasonable or realistic way. It can only comprehend the state of 'normality' of which itself is a part. The strangeness of the 'other within' that learns to deal with lifeboat realities remain an outsider looking in, rather than an insider looking out. It is the beggar children looking through the plate glass of an exclusive restaurant at the affluent priests eating their fare.

Lifeboat realities confront us with ethical dilemmas without simple solutions, and expose us to existential traumas from which we may suffer our entire lives. And there is no escaping either the confrontation or the traumatization. Such experience experiences render us 'strange' after their encounter, and this 'strangeness' does not go away wit time, but only sinks deeper into our character and becomes more embedded within our lives. Cumulative, this existential condition comes to exert and overwhelming and undermining influence upon our lives, an influence beyond our conscious control. It comes to color the relationships we have with others and overcasts our lives in shadows.

We cannot normally define the existential limits of human reality without ourselves venturing to the extremes of those limits in order to gain its experience first-hand. We cannot presume to know, or even imagine, what such experience might be like, without venturing there ourselves.

But then, risking the limits of existence, we cannot return untransformed. And there is more than a little reality to this fundamental myth of human existence.

Looking back, to see what a 'science of existentiality' might look like, I can only point out one recurrent 'reality' behind many different realities. There are two kinds of people, two kinds of value orientation, two kinds of responsiveness and spontaneousness which characterize our common reality. These two kinds are possibly two different, contraposed 'modalities of being' forming different 'modes of consciousness' and ways of relating to reality. Not wanting to oversimplify, Nietsche's and Ruth Benedict's formulation of Dionysian and Apollonian archetypes roughly corresponds to some of the differences. Possibly the increasing centralization of authority in progressively modern state societies may have favored the promotion of the latter character type and the marginalization of the former. It is also possible that some people are more naturally inclined toward one extreme than toward the other, making the transition into a modern mode of being more difficult and problematic. Without a doubt, modern authority structures promote and routinely reinforce an 'ego-dystonic' mode of being in which aggressive tendencies and subject to greater pressures for internalization, sublimation and moderation. In my personal experience there may be a correlation with status consciousness and closed mindedness. Dr. Jacob Pandian, in his recent work, Culture, Religion and the Sacred Self (1981) contraposes to basic religious orientations, the Shaman and the Priest, in their different approaches toward sacredness. "Individuals may acquire shamanistic or priestly sacred selves in terms of how they use the symbols of the sacred other." (page 90) Ben Ami-Sharfstein, in his work The Mind of China: The Culture, Customs and Beliefs of Traditional China (1974) contrasts the Confucian and the Taoist in a parallel way. Likewise the Hindu Ascetic and the Brahmin priest may also be similarly compared.

Many other similar kinds of dualities may be found, but the two character orientations which I am referring to may cross cut many other conventional orientations of human reality. It is important to emphasize that these contrasting orientations represent opposite possible 'selves' in relation to existential events. How these events become experienced and later affect our lives, is largely determined by which orientation predominates within ourselves. I do not now presume to know what the critical difference might be, but there is a sense of a conversion experience which attends switching from one mode of being to the other. A.F.C. Wallace distinguishes between a 'relaxed' and a 'mobilized' state, and Pandian relates the Shaman/Priest dichotomy to the prophetic and routinized phases of social movements. The behavior modification attending stressful events and leading to 'nervous breakdowns' (brain washing) becomes a more or less permanently embedded state of the personality. But each orientation begets certain entailments, existential 'consequences of the long run'. It is furthermore likely that a balance between them is most desirable. Piaget distinguished between accommodative and adjustive strategies in learning. It is also part of the middle ground of meaning between the normal scientist and the science of existentiality. I believe this basic contrast to be generally applicable across cultures and histories. One of the aims of a science of existentiality is to distinguish these modes of being and to excoriate the possible 'reasons for being' which may be universal.