Being Human
Experiencing Life
The reality of the human condition forms the constant background of our lives.
Our perceptions reveal the flux of the world’s events. There is a richness of detail and form. One moment a droplet of water slides erratically down a window pane, merges with another droplet and accelerates. In another moment, the flavours and textures of food in the mouth wash over us. In yet another, we see a person and recognise who they are.
Some of what we see, we love. An experience connects with pleasant memories or imagined futures. Other experiences are painful or distressing.
Our actions impact the world. We pursue projects, sometimes fanatically, caught up in missions that feel all-important to us while we’re pursuing them.
We see other people similar to ourselves, each at the helm of the ship of their own life — acting and experiencing the world alongside us.
And we think. Most of the time, we are thinking. We remember, we plan, we fear, we worry. We fall in and out of love. We yearn. We admire and we blame. We imagine. Topics come to mind and thought leads to thought.
Finding Perspective
It is easy to become habituated to the constants of the human condition, for we’re all thoroughly familiar with what it is like to be ourselves with thoughts in our heads and sensations in our bodies.
It can be hard to have much perspective on what it is to be a human being, for the experience of being human is so all-encompassing. It is perfectly human to get carried along by life.
It is very human too, however, to occasionally stop and take stock — to ask: What is this thing we call life? Am I making good use of my own opportunity to pilot a body from cradle to grave?
Examining Life
Socrates was known for stopping people in the streets of Athens and forcing them to take stock of the fundamentals of human life. He was obsessed with questions of what it means to live well and, believing that other people also needed to think about these matters, he would spur them to thought with probing questions.
Many of those in authority didn’t like their ignorance being exposed by his questions. Some thought him a disruptive influence and, in the end, he was tried for not respecting the state gods and for corrupting the youth.
He dismissed the offer of any punishment that would have prevented him from pursuing what had become his life mission.
— Plato1
Socrates instead accepted a sentence of death by drinking hemlock. His philosophical methods were immortalised by the young Plato, and his example inspired a tradition of asking probing questions that lasts to this day.
Three Great Givens
We can all follow the precedent Socrates set. We can take stock of the fundamentals of human life ourselves and go on to examine what it means to live well.
A careful exploration shows there to be three great givens of the human condition needing acknowledged.
Inhabiting a Universe
The first great given is the existence of the universe as a whole.
The universe provides the background for all our stories — and the foreground too, for everything we might know of is part of the universe, even the process of thinking itself.
Being an Animal
The second great given is that we are animals.
As animals, we are each alive for a limited time, and we inhabit bodies and minds that have been sculpted by natural selection to help us in our animal quests. Survival. Health. Reproduction.
Having a Human Mind
The final given is the unique abilities and propensities of the human mind.
We can turn our attention to anything, even to our own ability to pay attention.
We are even able to carry out the systematic investigations needed for a person to start becoming clear about what living well truly means.
- Plato, Apology, 38a5–6.