OUR DUAL NATURE – FOR ONESELF OR FOR THE OTHER?
The human individual does things for itself and for the other. In a qualitative sense, our lives differ according to the kind of experiences we can enjoy and suffer between these two experiential blocks. In other words, our lives are an amalgam of the time dedicated to ourselves and the life devoted to others, and the good life must be found through some kind of harmonious relationship between the two pillars of this duality.
It would be difficult to imagine a person who only did things for him or herself, and likewise hard to conceive of a person who only did things for others. Nevertheless, some do more for themselves than others, and others do more for others than themselves. On the surface what we are saying here seems obvious and simple enough, or at least until we start defining the protagonist elements of the duality itself: In any individual case we know what the person itself is because it is the one we are concerned with, but who or what is the other?
The answer to this question has deep, qualitative significance in our lives. Most individuals will have an enormous amount of different others passing through their lives making the answer seem too complicated to warrant a reply, but if we group the separate others into common groups and make Venn diagrams of them we should be able to draw up a workable picture of the Big Others that we all do things for. For example, in almost all cases there will be one circle in the diagram to represent the people that are close to us (our friends and family), another to represent the thing called money (to which we can attach the subset of the work-place), another circle will represent the society, which will in part be both within the other circles and out of them, and these will all be enclosed by the greater sets representing culture and country, God or religion, and these will all be enclosed partly or fully by the greater subset we call civilisation.
In rare instances there will be other others that are more difficult to place in our Venn diagram. The others of the arts and sciences, which could be either in or out of civilisation; and also the other of humanity, which in most cases will be the smallest subset of all, for only a very small minority of humanity dedicate any time to humanity.
Logic would suggest that humanity should envelope all those other different fields for we are talking about collectives of human beings or collectives of things that are human creations. Nevertheless, this would not make sense in our diagram, because we are trying to represent what human beings are concerned with in their lives and what is the influence of the others that we do things for.
Seen in this way humanity presents two problems: Firstly, where should we situate humanity in our Venn diagram? And secondly, why do human beings dedicate so little of their lives to humanity itself? When we do things to make money or to help our family or friends it very rarely would be of any benefit at all for humanity. Humanity in our Venn diagram, may touch on all the other sets, but only slightly. In reality, most human beings would hardly dedicate any of their time to humanity at all, and this is symptom of the state that humanity finds itself in. If the parts do next to nothing for the whole, then the abandoned whole will soon find itself to be infirm and dying. Perhaps, in fact, humanity is already long dead. Those who are dedicated to humanitarian causes are alike to students of Latin, or a life-support machine maintaining the vital signs of a patient in a deep coma: They keep the dead thing alive, but barely.
Dead, but not completely. Might there still be a chance that we can resurrect it?
