In short, the practical life is constituted in efforts to alter our existence as we currently understand it or to ward off alterations that threaten what we at present take to be satisfactory. Initiating change or defending against change are both alterations and, as they are ever present, have no point of termination. We may talk of programs or plans for change, but we do not require programs or plans for us to be immersed in the experience of change, which proceeds regardless of programs or plans. The conduct of life is inseparable from the experience of change, and every attempt to get beyond the felt necessity of change is an effort to get beyond the life that we have been given.
Since this radical temporality is a universal condition of human existence, all human actions belong to the realm of change, including actions that aim to bring changes to conclusive closure. We talk of what is practical or impractical, but these terms are themselves immersed in the medium of change about which we are trying to get our bearings. What is practical or impractical is a matter that can never be finally settled, because human conduct can never be finally settled except perhaps in death. “Practice is activity, the activity inseparable from the conduct of life and from the necessity of which no living man can relieve himself” (EM, 257). “Change we can believe in” is an argument within this endlessness, as is the proposition to be “suspicious of all change.” We need hardly profess belief in change, although much rhetorical energy is spent in such professions; indeed, we have no choice but to accept it. Believing that this or that particular change is the change to end all changes requires suspension of disbelief of a certain kind.
Nevertheless, there is a tendency to imagine ideal worlds that are taken to exist independently and that we wish to bring into the currently unsatisfactory world to transform it. This too is natural to us and is implied in our desire to transcend the ordeal of change, and as well because we quite understandably want to assuage the pains of conscious existence. Such ideal worlds may be helpful in clarifying our self-understanding and purposes to ourselves, but the reality in which we are immersed, and which we experience as transcending the momentary and evanescent, is never captured by the images of it that we make for ourselves, even if we fall in love with those images, as we frequently do.
The attempted escape from the endlessness of practical life is only the promise of ultimate rescue at some distant point when what we think we want now will come to pass in such a way that we will be glad to have it. As Hegel reminds us, however, much human effort is spent in undoing the results of our past successes. In this situation we have the experience of freedom but seek a condition beyond freedom. The unavoidable question of what our freedom is for dramatizes the predicament we are considering. The ordeal of freedom is that we must deal with the question of purpose, direction, or the conversation of mankind redemption. We participate in defining what purpose, direction, or redemption means, even as we want these to have independent validity in themselves. We understand ourselves to be deciding for ourselves how we ought to be, but how do we deal with the absence of a voice to proclaim, “Well done thou good and faithful servant”?
We must, then, live in radical temporality, but we do not have to live for it. We can come to terms with it by acknowledging it and learning to expect no more of it than it gives. “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” But traditional philosophy is drawn to a transcendent dimension of which we would say not that “it ought to be” but that “it is” and does not require to be “put into practice.” The temporal/mortal existence gives rise to the thought of its negation or its completion in the eternal/immortal. But unless we experience this through living fully in the present moment we will at best have a momentary sense of release from our ineluctable time-boundedness.
manwithoutqualities 