What is a human being designed to do as an animal?
Bees have wings, can fit inside flowers, and some even have pollen sacks on their legs - it seems pretty obvious what their vocation as bees is. It doesn't seem like a bee, or any other animal for that matter, is ever concerned about what activities will ultimately make it happy by satisfying it's existential reason. It just goes about being a bee.
It seems asking the question "What should I be doing?" is part of being human - it's our way of collecting pollen, so to speak. However; no doubt there will have been selective pressures which would have caused Homo sapiens to evolve in to the animal it is today. Were we so lost from the time we mutated in to our present form? I can't imagine so.
Just because we can ask questions, should we constantly ask them?
What if the question we constantly ask is "I wonder what it would be like to not ask questions all the time?"... and so we never find the answer.
The answer can be very easily obtained, but we just keep asking the question because we think that being thirsty for verbal knowledge is humanity's basic vocation, and so it never occurs to us that knowledge doesn't have to be verbally dictated or mulled over philosophically via our internal dialog; that it can be experienced outside of words - like the act of moving our limbs, balancing on a surf board, or our tongue moving food around in our mouth.
In this way; maybe humanity's primary vocation is not using words - maybe it is just to get on with things without asking questions. We don't ask ourselves questions when trying not to bite our tongues while eating and moving food around in our mouths: "Should I move my tongue more this way?" - we just adjust naturally, yet consciously.
It seems this kind of mind can be brought to any activity we do. In this sense humanity's natural vocation could be just to get on with things for the sake of getting on with things so that our questioning mind doesn't stop us from finding any real answers to our problems in non-verbal activity. "Which way should my tongue move in order not to get biten as I chew? ..Hmm..maybe this way - ..oops nearly bit myself then... how about this way?..hmm.. oops nope" - it's seems stupid to even contemplate.
What words do you need to remember to drive a car? What words do you need to remember to cut vegetables? What words do you need to remember to wash your hair? Etc., etc. As Nike says: "Just do it" - I am not in to the ethics of multinationals, but they've got a point.
For anyone to get on with such an approach, it appears it has to be a practice at first. Words are famously difficult tools to put down in any situation. For some reason it seems we always need a rambling internal dialog to do anything - this is not the case, and often it could be a hindrance: "Watch out! don't spill it!" the brain shouts, and what do we do? We spill it.
If an activity is wrong for us, then it will feel wrong before it is philosophically wrong. Falling off bicycles has never had a philosophical school supporting such an activity - why think up an argument for not doing so? It's obvious; is it not?
August 2010
July 2010