Being human is hard - being together is harder

Being free and undetermined makes it a challenge to avoid destroying each other

A lot of philosophical problems come about because human language is a little too good at doing certain things. Chief among these things is the description of objects, through sentences like “the sky is blue” or “the grass is green”. These sentences describe entities that have fixed, predetermined essences, essences which explain and predict what we can expect of these entities. Maybe our theories about these essences will be replaced by better science someday, but we believe that these essences themselves are not going to change. 

This use of language - describing objects with fixed essences - works wonderfully in many circumstances, which unfortunately inspires us to use language in this way improperly. One notable way that this use of language fails is in describing existence itself, where we try to describe existence as yet another thing that exists. We can say “grass is a thing that exists” and have that make sense to us, but once we say “existence is a thing that exists” then we fall into a useless kind of self-reference - the usual ways of using language break down here, and we have to turn to other tools (language which points beyond language somehow) to really dig in to that inquiry. 

Another way that language breaks down is when we describe ourselves as if we are objects with fixed essences. To be a human is to be self-determining, at least partially - unlike inert objects like grass, I have a say in what it means to be me. I have free will, or at least I certainly seem to, and get to choose the projects and people that I commit to in my life. Crucially, much of our human essence is relational - we know ourselves not just as isolated rational thinkers but as people-among-people. We know ourselves as children, parents, lovers, co-workers, citizens. These aren’t general categories for us either - I am not just a lover in general but am a lover of this person, I am not just a citizen in general but a citizen of this country etc. Our identities are profoundly bound up with the particular life that we share with other people. 

Critically, then, to be a human is to be what we say that we are and that others agree that we are. This, I think, is the area where the breakdown of human language can be felt most painfully. We feel this pain when we enter disagreement about what we are with the people around us. We feel this pain when we hide our true selves, when we understand ourselves differently than we let the people around us understand us, for whatever reason. The fullest expression of human life is to live in agreement about what we are with the people around us, and unfortunately this is something that can never happen. At least, it’s not something that can ever happen necessarily and universally - I’m an American who lives in a liberal democracy, guaranteeing that I share a country with people who lead lives wildly different from mine and who are nevertheless permitted to vote and permitted to flourish on their own terms just like I am. There are people who will never, ever, agree with me about what it means to be me, people who will find me instantly disgusting and who would attack me on sight if they knew they would get away with it. Maximizing my freedom to fully express myself and have the world reflect that expression back to me would mean destroying their freedom to say “no”. And vice versa! 

So the best we’ll be able to do is to organically self-select ourselves into families and communities where everyone “gets it” about what it means to be “us”. We’ll generally express our preference for the familiar, to be around people where we don’t have to pay some psychic tax of self-censorship or struggle to communicate in ways that make more sense to the other person than to ourselves. And then, crucially, we’ll have to make peace with the existence of people who disagree with us about what it means to be us. 

For me, one critical way of making peace with that deep kind of difference is recognizing that I could have been them. I don’t have a fixed essence, meaning that I could have wound up like them if life had shaken out differently, if I’d been born to a different family and made different choices and encountered different people. I hold no monopoly on being human - me being the way that I am is not because I am Just and they are Wicked, I am Rational and they are Stupid - my ability to justify myself comes to an end somewhere! 

The end of justification among self-determining humans is where violence begins - to be human is to be Rational and Good, and I know that people who are different from me are not Rational and Good, and so people who are different than me aren’t really people, and as such those “people” can be manipulated and destroyed as I see fit. Every day that our liberal democracy doesn’t dissolve into violent chaos is an extraordinary miracle. 

This is one of the many tragedies of being human - to be fully self-expressed we need the human world to reflect our self-identification back to us, but we need that reflection to be given freely. We can point a gun at other people, or at ourselves, and demand that they submit to our will and agree with us about what we are. But we know that they’ll go back to disagreeing with us the second that the threat is gone - perhaps the temporary coerced agreement brings a bit of needed relief, but it doesn’t conjure the actual effect of creating a shared world with others. We want a world in which others spontaneously agree with us, in which we can rest assured that they authentically encounter reality in the same way that we do, where others are sharing our world even when we aren’t forcing them to do so.

So, then, we have two options: we can seek to seize the government and force everyone to agree with us about what it means to be us, and hope that people who disagree with us don’t seize the government and force everyone do disagree with us about what it meanes to be us - or, we can settle for a society in which our identity is up for grabs, where some people affirm it and some people do not, where it’s up to us to meet people where they’re at and quietly do some convincing and make peace with the limits of our ability to do so. Neither are entirely satisfactory, but thus is human finitude - our powers, like our lives, come to an end somewhere, and until that end we have to figure out how to live with ourselves and especially with each other. To be human means we have to make peace with each other, or we have to die trying.