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모든 것의 가장자리에서 - 나이듦에 관한 일곱 가지 프리즘
파커 J. 파머 지음, 김찬호.정하린 옮김 / 글항아리 / 2018년 7월
평점 :
면밀히 들여다보지 않은 삶이 살만한 가치가 없다면, 마찬가지로 생기 없는 삶은 면밀히 들여다볼 가치가 없습니다.(78쪽)
Simon McEwen이 2017년 10월 2일에 쓴 “The unexamined life if surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?”이란 글 전문을 인용한다.
Recently, I feel I’ve achieved a state of personal authenticity. I’ve obtained a sense of clarity of my own values, goals, and opinions and have achieved a healthy distance from the effects of negative external opinions and have steered off the path towards becoming a product of our culture. In a recent article, I discussed my admiration for authenticity and in it, highlighted the importance of self-knowledge and dove deeper into the echoes of Socrates words “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
I’m keen to challenge myself on this statement. I recently finished a great book by Daniel Klein titled ‘Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change it’. A Harvard philosophy graduate and as a life-long philosopher he has explored the full range of ideologies adopted by thinkers across time. What I really enjoyed about this book was its simple structure. It was based on pithies which Daniel collected throughout periods in his life. He laid out each pithy, discussed the time he recorded it, and then went on to explore that thought in the present moment. One of the many pithies Daniel recorded is a polar-opposite counter question to Socrates’ quote mentioned above. Adam Phillips, British psychoanalyst and philosopher said, “The unexamined life if surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?”
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the modern man has an innate fondness for avoiding living in the present. We are so preoccupied with the lives we have not lived that we forget about appreciating the one we actually have. We have many reliable cognitive abilities to drift away from the present by fantasying “What next?” or the clincher, “What might have been?” Phillips argues that “We think we know more about the experience we don’t have than the experiences we do have.” This “unlived life” of our imagination becomes our tormentor as it heightens in clarity and significance over our present life. Phillips continues, “And what was not possible becomes the story of our lives… Our lives become a protracted mourning for, an endless trauma about, the lives we are unable to live.”
We trap ourselves in the vicious cognitive distortion of playing the “What if” game, a deeply ungratifying way to live and certainly not a way in which one can nurture a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is on the other end of the spectrum of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. Phillips makes us question our fundamental philosophies and notion of ‘self-actualisation’:“I don’t want to say self-knowledge is useless. But we need to know when self-knowledge is genuinely useful and when it isn’t. There are some situations where the struggle to ‘know’ about an experience is a distraction from the experience itself.”
I still believe a purposeful acquisition of self-knowledge is an essential act required for individuals to obtain a sense of clarity and comfort necessary to navigate and handle the impermanence of life. However, I do agree that there is a line which can be easily crossed, if not carefully considered, which distracts us from the present moment and brings us no benefit; ultimately resulting in loss of time, a likely increase in personal torment, all for the acquisition of superfluous information.
Simon McEwen에 따르면 “The unexamined life is not worth living.”은 소크라테스가 한 말이고, “The unexamined life if surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?”은 여기에 Adam Phillips가 거꾸로 제기한 의문이다. 파커 J. 파머가 그 사실을 알고 평서문으로 바꿔 인용한 것인지, 스스로 이렇게 정리한 것인지 알 수 없으되, 이는 중요하지 않다. 내가 이 문제를 이렇게까지 거론하는 까닭은 “면밀히 들여다보지 않은”이란 번역문구와 “생기 없는”이란 번역문구의 뜻을 도무지 파악할 수 없었기 때문이다.
Simon McEwen의 논지에 기본적인 동의를 한다고 전제할 때, unexamined는 “self-knowledge”와 unlived는 “self-actualisation”과 평행이다. “면밀히 들여다보지 않은”, 특히 “생기 없는”은 오역에 가깝다. “생기 없는”이라고 번역한 unlived는 말 그대로 “have not lived”(Simon McEwen)다. 위 본문의 뜻은 아마 이 정도지 싶다.
“스스로를 성찰하지 않는 삶이 살만한 가치가 없다면, 마찬가지로 스스로를 살아내지 않은 삶은 성찰할 가치가 없다.”
스스로를 살아낸다는 말은 두 가지 의미를 담고 있다. 하나는, 자기 자신의 경험에서 삶을 시작한다는 것이다. 자신의 경험을 우선순위에 놓는다는 것이다. 다른 하나는, 상상하고 가정하고 평가해서 만든 내러티브에 정신을 파느라 삶의 몸/물질적 본질을 놓치지 않는다는 것이다. 대단히 중요한 문제다. 아니 근원적인 문제다. 삶은 내 몸에서 시작해 네 몸으로 건너가는 사건이다. 마음은 이 사건을 온전하게 하려고 인간에게 부가된 무엇이다. 인간이 인간이란 종적 집착을 놓아버린다면 마음 따위는 필요하지 않다. 그야말로 무심히 신의 길을 간다. 나는 이렇게 말한다.
“스스로를 성찰하는 삶이 살만한 가치가 있다면, 스스로를 온전히 살아내는 삶은 차마 성찰할 수가 없다.”