The Essence of Being Human
Animals may be content when their needs are satisfied; humans insist not only on being satisfied but also on being able to satisfy, on being a need not imsply on having needs. Personal needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed? There is no human being who has not been moved by that anxiety.
Humans are not satisfied, lie is not meaningful to us, unless life is serving an end beyond itself, unless it is of value to someon else. The feeling of futility that comes with the sense of being useless, of not being needed in the world, is the comost common cause of psycho-neurosis. Happiness may be defined as he certainty of being needed.
But who is in need of humans?
Human existence cannot derive its ultimate meaning from society, because society itself is in need of meaning.
There is not a soul on earth which, however vaguely or rarely, has not realized that life is dismal unless mirrored in something which is lasting. Ulimate meaning implies not only that humans are part of a whole, an adjunct to greatness, but an answer to a question, the satisfaction of a need.
The awareness of transcendent meaning comes with the sense of the ineffable. The imperative of awe is its certificate of evidence, a universal response which we experience not because we desire to, but because we are stunned and cannot brave the impact of the sublime. It is a meaning wrapped in a mystery.
The sense of wonder is not the mist in our eyes or the fog in our words. Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality, our confrontation with that which transcends the given. Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning that is greater than ourselves. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ulitmate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
In spite of our pride, in spite of our acquisitiveness, we are driven by an awareness that something is asked of us; that we are asked to wonder, to revere, to think and to live in a way compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.
I am commanded, therefore I am. There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in human consciousness, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at a certain moment to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.
--notes from a talk by A.J. Heschel, 1965
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