Elegy For A Young Canadian

Vol. 1 Issue 13

When events that we humans classify as tragic occur there are those of us, that is to say nearly everyone, that look to an outside force, an entity, a divine being, something greater than ourselves whom is perhaps responsible for the tragedy at hand. We look for guidance. Some look to a god, Biblical, Koranic, Talmudic to try to make sense of something that is completely senseless, at least seemingly senseless to us, and so we search. I am not a religious person. I’m actually the farthest thing from it, and so I look to other sources to try and sort out this senselessness; My Aunt, mother of two, wife, sister and daughter, Pamela Doyle was taken from this world on Saturday January 5^th, the world of our humanly senses, and moved on into the next.

Our abilities to reason, our rationale: As humans we are flawed. We are designed to process things only in certain way and these abilities seemingly fail us when put to the test. It’s like we’ve been given the wrong tools for the job, and left without an instruction manual.  

Philosophy is how I deal. I’ve being reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and realizing just how unprepared we are to deal with so many situations that we encounter, like tragedy. Kant talks about all the things we think we know about the world and objects within it, and then he asks: how do we know these things? Well, the answer is usually easy enough, we know the world through or senses (empirically). We know the sky is blue because we can see it is blue. This sensory perception though is only that, our ability to perceive the external world and process it, as we are able to.

Kant thinks there must be more than that. The sky that I see and refer to as blue may not be the same blue to you, it may in fact be what I would call red, but somewhere, beneath our perceptions blue is blue, regardless of how we perceive it, name it, refer to it, or acknowledge it.

There are entire sets of principles and concepts though that we know intrinsically (á priori), not having gained the knowledge of them though our senses or our experiences, time and space for example. Kant says about time: it is a pure intuition. It exists, and would exist regardless of our observation of it. He says that time is pure in that it is not subject to our unreliable sensory observations.

We humans have this conception that time is successive, that time occurs and passes in a straight line, one segment of time after another but time, I think, is linked, intertwined directly with the notion of change: as time passes things change. Change seems to be successive and this is how we measure time.

We are able to somehow know this intrinsically, that things change with time, but we have no evidence that time itself moves in a line forward. Remove change from the equation and what evidence do we have that time moves straight? Kant says, “Different times are merely one and the same time.”

So why are we are able to perceive and use our sense of reason to deduce knowledge of the universe, and then, once we take it all in, have no idea how to comprehend it? Why is our sense of reason so fucked-up?

I am not in any position to answer this. Who even knows what “life” is, and this biological phenomenon that we have called consciousness doesn’t even equip us with the tools to deal with occurrences that are as standard to human existence as natural laws and gravity are to the cosmos.

What the heck am I talking about? It means that we are ill equipped to deal with anything outside of what our senses can account for: Life and Death.

We are born, we live, and then we die. This is common knowledge, yet we still have no way to perceive what happens after death. All we are equipped with are measly five senses, and no Kantian intrinsic, á priori knowledge, and so, we can are left to try and fill in the gaps with our intuition, or emotions, our longing, our imagination, everything that is strictly human; we try to make order out of chaos.

Even looking to religion: Jesus, a divine being thrust into this human world, having taken a human form, and with this a set of human senses, hang dying, confused, unable to comprehend His circumstances proclaimed, In the Ninth Hour, just as He was about to depart from this human world and enter His true domain of heaven, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

Jesus, a god in human form, prophesied his own death it in all four of the Gospels, knew He would die, not just as all humans do, but actually knew exactly how and when from the start, and even He, Jesus Christ, felt abandoned by his God when His sun set. What are we regular humans supposed to do then?

A more comforting thought comes from Saint John. As Jesus is being lead away He turns and proclaims to his disciples “but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22).

So Pam, although you have left this world, the only world that our humble senses can unmask, and have moved into another realm, a realm where our abilities of rationale and reason fail us, a realm where we cannot yet follow you, these are our flaws: The flaws of the living. The flaws of this world. These are not your flaws.

You deserved to die about as much as Christ did, taken too soon, for reasons unjust, and so, I believe that whether it is in a heavenly palace where our hearts shall be reunited, or in the spinning sands of Pure Kantian Time, we will rejoice. Amen.

Pamela Edith Doyle 1962-2013