To Be
To be or not to be is the fundamental philosophical question? I ask. Questions do beget yet other questions, strings of them following other strings, streams, the currents of thinking on what it means to be, being in direct connection with my becoming. It is not only a question of suicide, this to be or not, as so many assume, have assumed, I remember another myth of Sisyphus . . . what comes out of the mouth of Hamlet is so much more than what we imagine when we face the end of existence.. There is, of course, much more in the heaven and earth of Hamlet’s soliloquy than can be dreamed in anyone’s philosophy . . . you must know this. There is rarely anything so importantly placed as this soliloquy in any Shakespeare play that does not have a multiplicity of meaning and intent.
To be is the infinitive; I am is the first person singular present tense, active voice, indicative mood. Are you any closer to understanding what it means to be, or not to be, the opposite of the former? If I am at any moment, what I am I have become, but in having become I am no longer becoming. To become is not to be, thus to be must be not to become any longer . . . the limits of being are becoming, and vice-versa, the limits of becoming are being. When I am, I cease to become in the ways that would displace the being under consideration.
To be is to mediate being, of course, but demands that we state and restate and define and articulate. To choose an actual existence is part of this to be, for one must choose to be engaged in living in order to live, to be able to say I am this or I am that. I was this or that is yet another way to be, but not herein to be pursued.
To be engaged in living is to examine life for the unexamined life is not worth living, I know. I too have my dogmas, as I know the humanism I have followed has them. The non-dogmatic life is nearly impossible to find. I do agree with Socrates much to chagrin of many I meet today in my America who are oh so topical, oh so contemporary. It is by thinking that I am, or so Descartes via Hamlet reaches Socrates and then round trip to us, our contemporaneity. But the attempt to be contemporary is already to be out of date.
To be or not to be removes oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being. Non-being is as close to a primordial nothingness as anything related to annihilation. Thus a kind of death without it being suicide, unless we examine the state of perpetual becoming as the dispacement of being to the extent that it is suicidal to do so. In order to be, one must choose being in direct opposite tension with becoming.
One does resist the will of one’s plural nature. One must not resist his nature by artificially imposing a self to the psychic displacement of every other self that seeks its due on the stage of the many selves Self.
There is harmony that comes out of this seeming chaos of selves. This harmonic Self is not achieved by imposing one self among many to be the one and only. This harmony is achieved by conducting a symphonic coalescence of all of the selves in a Self of many selves macrocosmic to all existence.
[To be continued]
REVUE ONE 