18 June 2013
Discussed Text: David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water"
“You’re reading.” I’m glad that now you are aware.
Most of the time, it’s so easy to get lost with the personal matters in our lives, may they be trivial or not, that we tend to forget that we are humans. We forget how to feel like human, how to act like human, how to live like human and how to be like human. Just to add, a philosopher once mentioned, “The unexamined life is not worth-living.” This is why in spite of many things that constantly push us to go with the demands of time, it is still essential for us to make time, not just to find time, in inspecting our own being.
In the first discussion we had with Dr. Garcia, I actually find two significant points regarding humans that are really fascinating, or at least, worth-discussing. One is that humans must be aware of their own awareness and this was basically the purpose of the first line. The underlying reason here is that by one’s being aware of his awareness, by one’s being conscious of his own consciousness, it takes that person to a perspective of understanding not of what he deals with, but a greater leap from there, of what he really is. It enables one to see himself in a stranger-like point of view wherein he can evaluate his own thinking, actions and emotions for better judgment, but more importantly, experience himself as a human, as a being united to his own. At a particular encounter, it may be a feeling that one’s soul departs from his own physical body, but once the soul gets back to that body, he will realize that he is, indeed.
Second is that humans are capable both of knowing and not knowing. Obviously, the “known” and “not known” form two different sets and the two together constitutes a bigger set of knowledge, or the universal set. If that universal set exists, then, we can define a particular complement set “not known” to the identified set “known.” This supports the idea of the intricate relationship between knowing and not knowing, one being the complement of the other. This allows a person to differentiate or identify the things he knows from the things he doesn’t know, which frequently, he’s not aware of. By knowing that there are things he does not know, he must not simply remain in that stage. He must keep on striving and yearning to learn more, for that will sustain his life.
Let me end this with an attempt to understand human itself. Being human is not an attribute or a truth implied right at the start of our birth. It’s not even a state that one must reach or at least, attempt to reach. Rather, being human is a process that one constantly experiences. One keeps on doing more, one keeps on being more while experiencing his sense of being and I guess that is what it means to be human. One dreams, one hopes and one lives—up to eternity.
