Raison d'Etre

The new age has brought remarkable advances in technology understanding, and these advances only continue at an increasingly fevered pace as time goes on. Today, not only do we have the technology to look at the brain, we actually have the ability to see it in action. We can see our thoughts, our emotions, our very being reduced to the simplest form of action potentials and neurotransmitters. Can this truly be what makes us human? The transmission of electrochemical signals along billions of neurons, is that what makes a human?

The brain during NREM and REM sleep. Using MRI scans the activity of the brain can be mapped, allowing us to see the inner workings of the brain.

Humans are undeniably more than simply a series of action potentials, what emerges from that series is something greater than its components. Our minds and ability to reason and think are greater than the neurons that compose them. But all this begs the question of what our purpose, our reason to exist really are. If existence is so simple as the myriad chemical reactions that keep us alive, then what about the rest? Ultimately, while our biological reason to live is as simple as pure survival, what makes us human is not survival, but what we do as we survive. Rather, what makes us human is that we don't survive, we live. But ultimately that brings us to the question of what our purpose in life truly is, what does it mean to live?

Recently, our AP English Literature class was assigned the short story "The Destructors" by Graham Greene to read as homework. The story follows a boy named Trevor, whose parents came into hard times after World War II, and as a result Trevor falls in with a group of rowdy neighborhood kids who fancied themselves a gang. Their activities amounted to little more than petty theft though, until one day Trevor suggests that they break into the house of a man nicknamed Old Misery and completely demolish it bit by bit.

Reading this story, I came across a particular quotation that struck me as rather memorable and poignant. When Trevor is asked if he hates Old Misery, he cryptically responds, "Of course I don't hate him, there would be no fun if I hated him."

Trevor goes on to say, "All this love and hate, it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things...."

This quotation struck me as memorable because it seems that Greene essentially comments on what drives humans to do what they do, he comments on our drive to do something in life. Greene seems to suggest that its not truly love or hate that really motivates people to act in the manner that they do, that passion and animus are not the true motivators of action. Instead, Greene employs the metaphor of things to talk about the world we inhabit, the material world. Trevor states, "There's just things...." This metaphor essentially states that what truly matters, what truly drives us is the material world around us, we are driven to make an impact of this world in some way, even if only it is in the form of having existed, of having lived.

We live to live, we live to do something and leave the evidence of our existence behind in the material world. We live to experience the world by doing something, that is how humans live. Ultimately that is what makes humans humans. Not neurons and synapses, but by our innate drive to live and exist and be a person. Indeed, animus and passion are not the motivators of action, our drive to action is what creates animus and passion. By existing, we become more human by inevitably experiencing these emotions.

That is why this quote was so memorable to me, because life is about what you can take and what you can keep. Our life is the sum of our experiences, our actions, and our responses. This quote is so memorable because it perfectly sums that up.

Humans are capable of a great many things. We are capable of good things and bad things. Benevolent and malevolent things. But for better or for worse we exist to do these things because that is what gives existence meaning beyond survival. This is how we live. By taking things, taking actions that leave a mark on the material world, once again for better or worse. That is our Raison d'Etre.

"Composition 7" by Wassily Kandinsky, there is beauty in the complexity of this piece, but I believe it serves as an example that ultimately we are greater than our component parts, our minds are greater than their component neurons. We transcend such a reduced model when we take actions and create or destroy, it is our actions that give life its meaning.