Often lately I've been contemplating
“responsibility,” both as a concept and a word. To say we have a
responsibility means, as is quite literally enumerated in the word
itself, your ability to respond; eg. your “response-ability.”
It's not so much an abstract construct as it is a general disposition
contingent on your capacity to notice events, people, and objects
around you and thus 'compute' your responses to such based on your
available repertoire of abilities. At its most basic form, it's
nothing more than how you respond to life and all events, people, and
objects in it. In its higher form, it's also what initiatives one's
intention to respond may generate and thus entail.
Ultimately, both basic and higher form
response-ability are unavoidable. To attempt to abdicate either is
simply to stand in petrified denial of life itself. The beautiful
thing, however, is that there is no concrete road-map or template
with which to assuage existential angst or command yourself with
unwavering certainty as to what a 'correct' response would be or
might look like. Some of the more philosophically traumatized writers
of the past century have presented this as a terrifying state of
affairs in the absence of the illusory certainty previously provided
by Judaeo-Christianity, often topping off a similar diatribe about
the ambiguity inherent in one's choosing how to respond in any given
circumstance with, “and now man is utterly alone in the universe,
condemned to act and react to life in its totality on the fragmentary
and thus flawed moral and ethical merits devised and implemented by
himself, and himself alone.”
This is one of many 19th and
20th century philosophical examples (paraphrased and
reduced from the writings of many nihilists, existentialists,
post-structuralists, etc.) of the psychic overcompensation for the
loss of God in the general cultural metanarrative(s) of our day. This
was expected even by Nietzsche, the man who himself declared God dead when he
wrote: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for
centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but
given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years
in which his shadow will be shown. And we still have to vanquish his
shadow, too.” In the absence of God, our metanarratives became, at
best, emptier, more confusing, seemingly illegible—while at worst,
they morphed into vacuous black-holes that sucked away all that was
previously thought so sacred and meaningful in our lives.
Either way, the important point is that
a collective psychological wound was inflicted upon us, and as all
organisms do when wounded, we recoiled in pain. But since it was a
collective reflex recorded in detail for posterity through the work
of many brilliant thinkers, many of us became as immersed in and as
convinced of these new insights like they were eternal religious
truths, something to fill the gaping hole of meaning left by God,
even if this 'meaning' described its central meaningful insight as
'meaninglessness.' Some philosophers and their readers thus found the
certainty they had lost in their new doctrinal uncertainty. In other
words, they were no longer simply uncertain; they were certainly uncertain. Even if this led to bleakness in perspective, some of
those who felt they needed the guarantee of certainty were willing to
go to the darkest corners of the psyche to find it.
In this certain uncertainty, many of us
fell for the illusion of a fiercely hyperbolic individuality and
lost our ability to respond meaningfully to life, because life,
though certain in its uncertainty, remained as dead as before. This
describes the state and sensation of abdicating responsibility
(response-ability) on both key levels, and demonstrates the petrified
denial of life itself that results from and embodies this attitude.
It is my assertion that we now have the
will and ability to cross this horizon of hopelessness in human
thinking. By taking responsibility for ourselves, holding a belief in
our honest heroics, truly cultivating our ability to respond to
anything life does or can throw at us without compromise, and
trusting our impulses to meaning without becoming intoxicated by
neatly ordered systematized worldviews that appear to offer us some
form of certainty equivalent to the old self-evident religious truths
we've lost, and if we can do all of this without rejecting meaning
wholesale whenever we lack the old conventional resorts provided by
ready-made worldviews, we'll once again wake ourselves up and ask the
most important question of all: “is it not beautiful?”
