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Editorial
Being Human
by Rick Lewis
“Unhand me, grey-beard loon.”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In a clearing on the edge of the woods, a flying saucer stands on spindly legs among the still-smouldering vegetation. A door slides open, light spills out, and a green face with three eyes peers at the gaggle of fearful spectators below and asks them: “What is it like to be a human being?” This is also one of the main questions being asked in the themed section of this very issue.
You might protest that this is the one thing that you don’t need anybody to tell you. You’re the expert. After all, each and every one of us has first-hand experience of what it is like to be a human being. In some ways, possibly, it is the only thing of which we do have first-hand experience, since our experience of everything beyond ourselves comes to us through our bodies’ senses, filtered and neatly sorted and labelled by those senses and by what Immanuel Kant called the ‘categories of understanding’ in our minds. In any case, you yourself have fought in the muddy trenches of human life, whether literally in Ukraine or metaphorically in any corner of the world. You yourself could write an epic about human experience – and many have.
However, it is one thing to experience life in all of its glory and pain, and another thing to find a quiet place to stand and reflect upon that experience. Socrates famously claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Our columnist Ray Tallis, at the recent launch of his book Prague 22, remarked that on this point he disagreed with Socrates. When he was a medical doctor, he said, he had had untold numbers of patients with no interest in philosophy whatsoever – yet many of them he considered to be moral giants, for uncomplainingly enduring the greatest afflictions and challenges. Their lives were certainly worth living, examined or not. Their lives were full of effort and sacrifice and success and failure and full of meaning, whether philosophically dissected or not. Nonetheless, reflecting on and understanding human experience adds depth and clarity and can help us in a thousand practical ways. And what better time to do that than the crowded present? Sometimes it seems like the bombardment of our senses with new experiences and new possibilities is increasing exponentially. We are paper boats in a storm.
So out of this broad and deep expanse of human experience, what aspects will our contributors examine? Firstly, Vikas Beniwal will delineate the broad headings under which we might consider humanity, and recount what a range of historical philosophers have had to say about them. He talks of humans as rational beings (though some would say the jury is still out on that); humans as part of nature (though we have a habit of seeing ourselves as apart from it and putting nature into well-marked reserves where it can be visited by vacationers); and, of course, humans as part of society. As he says, Aristotle called humans ‘social animals’, and this is certainly one of the most fundamental aspects of our lives. A big chunk of ethics concerns our dealings with one another within society, and some ethicists such as Adam Smith and David Hume, have said that sympathy is the true basis of all ethics. What then is sympathy? Behold James Robinson’s article on sympathy and on how you can tell it apart from its similar-looking cousin, empathy.
The rich tapestry of human experience contains so many threads woven together, but our contributors expertly unpick some of them and examine them separately. We have an article on guilt and one on love (both of which again have to do with our relations with others), one on pain, and one on hope. Will reading them enhance your human experience? I would love to think so, and I hope it does, but if not I might feel sympathy, pain and guilt. In any case, happy reading!
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