Among all uncertainties, doubts and self-criticism which today’s philosophy leads usin, once adopted a method that, rather than by reasoning or statements of truth, proceeds by narratives, experiences and humility, we recognize ourselves immersed in an underlying truth; after all the above, it is understood that this is not a metaphysical truth, but an experience. This truth is: we are human beings. From here we can explore the most fruitful consequences. Among them, it seems to me that there are two particularly important. About one, love, I have already talked in the two previous posts: as human beings we naturally consider love as the maximum implementation of our being; I do not enter into the question of what love is, having already treated it in the same posts. The other consequence of our being human that I find important is justice: as human beings we find within ourselves the instinctive need for justice; we are indignant and suffer when we see prevail in life who has done nothing to deserve it, whereas those who have worked and given much finds himself unfortunate and hampered. Even with regard to justice we can see that it is not an objective value: in nature we find different examples of injustice, for which the involved beings certainly do not pose to themselves existential problems; but it will also be sufficient to observe the simple fact that everything is open to criticism, especially any metaphysical concept of truth and thus also of justice.
If we connect love and justice, we can deduce that we human beings can consider even imperative to sacrifice to them other components of existence, including life itself. It is just to sacrifice anything for love.
This feeling, in addition to the need for a theoretical definition of love, which we have already dealt, also involves a problem of practical definition. It is a problem that affects not only our instinct to form theoretical concepts, but also the practical choices that we happen to do. A few examples will clarify the idea. If a spouse falls in love with another person, it will not be so easy to determine whether true love is what he experienced in his marriage, or the new kindled flame; if a parent has to solve a conflict between his child and a stranger, it will not be so easy to determine to what extent to love the stranger as well, possibly at the expense of the preferential treatment to give to his child.
In any case, what I find here more fruitful for deepening is not the discernment in these problematic situations. I find it more efficient to continue what has been said before, that is, whatever the situations created, as human beings we can feel, as criteria to follow in each case, love, wherever it is identified. In this sense we understand that following love can sometimes result in the separation of a couple, defending a stranger to the detriment of one’s child, or the opposite. The horizon I’m getting at is that following love can often be a destabilizing criterion for social or private life, or for certain spirituality in which life makes us get used passively; on the other hand, we all know that, because of this, in certain cases, some preferred to sacrifice love to stability; we can just think, as an example, to marriages for money.
Continuing the discussion, we suspect that following love can even lead to murder, revenge. Right now Bizet’s Carmen comes to my mind, or the suicide bombers, which, for what they believe unconditional love for their religion or their country, are willing to kill.
I’m not interested in this context to identify standards of morality, because they do not exist, at least as objective truths. Rather, I find it fruitful to note that all of this is spirituality. Evidently, the spirituality lived in these contexts does not identify any criteria for problem solving, but actually no other criteria exist able to do it. If, therefore, it is impossible to find solutions, and therefore it is useless to engage in research of them, we may suspect that adopting a criterion of experience, narration, spirituality, may prove to be a methodology at least enriching, fruitful, while not offering solutions that, on the other hand, no other ways can point.
It is a situation similar to the inevitability of human death: when one intuits that there are no more solutions, we might as well deal with how to die, rather than continuing to waste time in finding non existent solutions to stay alive. This seems to have been the path taken by Jesus. In this sense, working in our spirit for a walking and growing in the experience of love and justice may make us live, and if unavoidable even die, at least while we are walking along and experiencing the most enriching ways of growth that we have been given to identify. This is spirituality. In fact it is possible that it is also capable of giving rise to solutions for the problems, born from the narrative experiencing, which also means sharing and exchange of experiences.
