Четверг

"In what I am about to say... I do not mean to prejudge any cosmological questions, such as that of free will or necessity, theism or pantheism. I am concerned only with the sincere confessions of a mind that has surrendered every doubtful claim and every questionable assurance. Of such assurances or claims there is one which is radical and comprehensive: I mean, the claim to existence and to directing the course of events. We say conventionally that the future is uncertain: but if we withdrew honestly into ourselves and examined our actual moral resources, we should feel that what is insecure is not merely the course of particular events but the vital presumption that there is a future coming at all, and a future pleasantly continuing our habitual experience. We rely in this, as we must, on the analogies of experience, or rather on the clockwork of instinct and presumption in our bodies; but existence is a miracle, and morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. That it will always be analogous to itself is the very question we are begging. Evidently all interconnections and sequences of events, and in particular any consequences which we may expect to flow from our actions, are really entirely beyond our spiritual control. When our will commands and seems, we know not how, to be obeyed by our bodies and by the world, we are like Joshua seeing the sun stand still at his bidding; when we command and nothing happens, we are like King Canute surprised that the rising tide should not obey him; and when we say we have executed a great work and re-directed the course of history, we are like Chanticleer attributing the sunrise to his crowing.

What is the result? That at once, by a mere act of self-examination and frankness, the spirit has come upon one of the most important and radical of religious perceptions. It has perceived that though it is living, it is powerless to live; that though it may die, it is powerless to die; and that altogether, at every instant and in every particular, it is in the hands of some alien and inscrutable power." George Santayana, "Ultimate Religion," Obiter Scripta, ed. J. Buchler and B. Schwartz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), pp. 283

The long quotation calls our attention to some specific features of the radical action by which the self is, and is thus and so, among the equally contingent beings and processes which in its animal faith it takes for granted. The action by which I am, is not one by which I was thrown into existence at some past time to maintain myself thereafter by my own power. It is the action whereby I am now, so that it seems truer to say that I am being lived than that I live. I live but do not have the power to live. And further, I may die at any moment but I am powerless to die. It was not in my power, nor in my parents' power, to elect my self into existence. Though they willed a child or consented to it they did not will me - this I, thus and so. And so also I now, though I will to be no more, cannot elect myself out of existence, if the inscrutable power by which I am, elects otherwise. Though I wish to be mortal, if the power that threw me into being in this mortal destructible body elects me into being again there is nothing I can do about that. I can destroy the life of my body. Can I destroy myself? This remains the haunting question of the literature of suicide and of all the lonely debates of men to whom existence is a burden. Whether they shall wake up again, either here in this life or there in some other mode of being, is beyond their control. We can choose among many alternatives; but the power to choose self-existence or self-extinction is not ours. Men can practice birth-control, not self-creation; they can commit biocide; whether they can commit suicide, self-:destruction, remains a question. (Richard H. Niebuhr, "The Responsible Self: an Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy")

(16/11/2006)