Ed Searl's Journal: In My Estimation: Fruit of the Tree

[My favorite religious myth comes from Genesis. The two trees, Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, haunt my religio-spiritual imagination. A mystery of the human condition is a moral consciousness joined to a sense of mortality. This is a consciousness that often comes to a relatively young child. I sometime am asked to talk to a child as young as nine who has realized that s/he won't live forever. Here's a vignette from my new book on Ecclesiastes, Wisdom for the Ages, that speaks to this fundamental human awareness, the proverbial loss of innocence.]

The Thisness of Being

’ve just listened to a Canadian Broadcast Corporation “Writers and Company” interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein, regarding her new book Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God.

You can’t judge a book by its cover‒at least by its title. Ms. Goldstein’s new book is a novel‒a philosophical novel. She is a professional philosopher, a professor at Brandeis University, who some years ago wearied of analytical philosophy’s restrictions and branched into the writing of fiction. Her new book has garnered interest, in part, for the appendix that lists said thirty-six arguments and offers a brief critique of each.

The interview began with Ms. Goldstein remembering her youth, when she would lie in bed and think about the strangeness of her being. In thinking of her existential self, she had an extraordinary, heightened awareness that was both terrifying and thrilling. She wondered, why am I me? Do others perceive this me? At a very early age, she was genuinely mystified by the thisness of her own existence.

A practicing Orthodox Jew by birth through the years of her first marriage, she now declares herself probably agnostic, though she admires the rich nuances of a religious outlook. In the interview, she mused on the existential problem of death from a very ordinary point of view: how can all the aspects of personality, the complex world that each person is, simply cease to be? This non-existence was easy for her to accept for herself, but she couldn’t so readily accept it for those she loved, such as her father.

As a child, she had pondered death. As a philosopher, she’s still mystified by what she called the thisness of being. This blows her away. In this regard, philosophizing seems an ordinary human activity to her, as she seeks to understand what she first experienced non-rationally as a child.

Her memories stirred mine. I remember lying in bed as a child, the night dark and the room still. I thought about the common stuff of childhood‒school, friends, sports and such. But I also remembered that now and again, seeping in from where I didn’t know, came strange images of death, the thisness of my being falling into an abyss of nothingness. If I remember the accompanying emotion accurately, it had a sense of awesome dread that was also compelling. Fascinating is the mystical term. I didn’t want to think about non-being, but when I did, I had to take it to the edge of an abyss. Much later, when I encountered Rudolph Otto’s concept of the mysterium tremendum, I had a phrase to describe these episodes of apprehension and fascination about death. Later, Emily Dickinson’s haunting, “when I have fears that I may cease to be,” assured me that I wasn‘t alone in confronting this disturbing conclusion to being, the end of the thisness of my life and every life.

By no means a morbid child, I didn’t dwell on death. Was I precocious? Perhaps. But probably more children spontaneously entertain such episodes than we imagine.

Dying and death are important aspects of ministry, involving pastoral care and the rite of passage of either a funeral or memorial service. When the compulsion to write and publish a book came upon me in my mid-thirties, I followed the advice to write what I knew about. I fashioned a guide on crafting modern funeral and memorial services called In Memoriam. It’s been in print since 1993, reissued in 2000 in a second edition, and has become a standard resource even beyond the confines of my liberal religious tradition.

Considering this, my affinity for Ecclesiastes pops into focus. Though Ecclesiastes offers a litany of observations and aphorism about death, I’ve never found it morbid. It’s Realistic and it’s philosophical in a commonsense, everyman’s way.

A number of verses might be cited to highlight Ecclesiastes sensibility regarding mortality and the human response to it. In light of my own scheme of Natural Religion, I cite this selection:

I said in my heart, with regards to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They will all have the breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from dust, all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth? So I saw that there is nothing better than a man should enjoy his work, for that is his lot; who can bring him to see what will be after him? [3:18-22]