Seeking the Essential

Costantino Esposito - If someone asked me to give him a definition of what is essential in a person's life, I would probably have some difficulty in answering. This is not because I cannot identify, in principle, the fundamental values of human existence: the irreducible dignity of the self as a person, one's own irreducible freedom, the right to a dignified life, the search for truth and happiness, the need to be recognized and loved, the duty of sharing and responsibility towards others.

These are all things we know, or rather, we think we already know, but at best they remind us of the regulative ideas Kant spoke of, the ones we keep striving for but which soon prove to be unattainable ideals because we can never experience them in space and time. At worst, they become calls to duty to affirm the fundamental over the accidental, to follow the necessary over the superfluous.

In this loss of recognition lies the drama that marks the "essential" in our time: caught between the general principles of humanity and the difficult duties of society, the essential is there, imposing but somewhat inert, incapable of really moving existence, like the glorious weight of our identity and the daily toil of our choices.

Therefore, to the question of how to define the essential, I would like to respond with another question, which perhaps points the way to a non-obvious answer to the first: how is it that today we can perceive the essential in life, in life? In order to define the ex-sensual, we must inevitably return to something that lies before the definition. In fact, it is precisely when the definition loses its relation to that from which it emerges (for it is so: definitions emerge from the experience of the self and of things, and not the other way around...) that the essential enters its critical phase, as is particularly the case today.

On the one hand, to speak of the "essence" of man has always meant to identify his "nature" or, as philosophers would say, the belonging of "man" to a certain genus and species (e.g., the animal genus, that is, living and mortal, but endowed with the specificity of reason). It is an objective identity, not invented by us, but found in us, given to us: it is the "substance" that we ourselves are, but that we do not decide to be.

We are born, we come into the world, we come to be in a "how" that moves us from within, that paradoxically comes from before us. Coming into being is possible precisely because we are not the creators, but only the receivers of being, those who assume ourselves.

But if our essence is identified with our substantial nature, then in order to be more than a general definition or structure, it must occur in a particular individual. Each of us is not just an "accident" of species, not just an accident of essence. Our essential being is given only and eminently in our singular experience. Our nature is given only as "history" happening in each moment; the objectivity of our face as human beings in the subjectivity of our self.

Therefore, the question of what is essential in life and for life coincides with the possibility we still have of noticing ourselves. Being and noticing being tend to coincide here. Of course, being is always greater than our awareness, but without this awareness it would not really be "essential.

That is, meaningful to us, but only a meaningless assumption to be endured, or a goal to be constructed by ourselves. Instead, the essential urges us, and it urges everything.

Or it is not.

And we have a foolproof test of whether we still recognize the essential in our nihilistic time, or whether we treat it as a senseless but unrealizable presupposition. The nihilism of our time suggests in the common mindset that we may well seek the ultimate meaning of our being in the world, but it will be impossible for us to find it because it is not there. And in the end, it will prove impossible to even continue to search for it. In this extreme state, the essential is no longer perceived as the concept of a need of our self. Perhaps it is an abstract principle, as mentioned above, or a duty, but no longer our real need.

But on closer inspection, it is precisely in our need that we can find the thread of resistance of the essential within us. The need for everything: not for one thing or another, but for being, for living, for breathing life. In fact, the need for every single thing, even those we could do without, is never "superfluous," because in every need a desire is rekindled that no satisfaction can ever silence.

We can also refuse to listen to this desire, which never, unpredictably, ceases to move us.

We can try to appease it in our strategies of self-construction.

We can even curse it or deny it. There is a permanent gap between our achievements and our desire that can never be closed, that always reopens. Is this not a sign that we are becoming aware of what is or can be essential to us?
The article was published on “Osservatore Romano” and the author has not revised the translation.
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