Living is a motley and difficult journey. Life raises matter in an improbable leap that opposes everything: the peaceful mineral gravity, scarcity and excess, the wear and tear of time, the universal increase in disorder... Astronomers search for habitable planets, and that task alone it is exquisitely arduous: the stars, the planets, the temperatures, the gases, everything must have come to an odd balance. And not even favorable conditions make life probable: the concurrence of countless chances is still missing, their confluence at a point where the happening against the current becomes a miracle. “The strange thing is to live”, writes Carmen Martín Gaite. Life is an exception, the fruit of a thousand exceptions, and every minute a legion of forces attack so much complexity, demanding a return to simplicity.
And is there anything simpler than dying? Just wait. Dying is the unavoidable arrival point of the leap of life, there where it returns to exact horizontality and the attempt ends. Death is the interruption of the exceptional, and its return to the baseline. If life requires strength and effort, and perhaps a certain derangement, dying imposes itself, it always happens and in peace. Everything helps in its way; nothing tires him, nothing contradicts him, nothing prevents him. That is simplicity.
How is life not going to waste us, if it is an exception and complexity? Over and over again we have to reaffirm it, and for this we have to relentlessly oppose what conspires against it, which is everything, including itself. Life has to be reconstructed and justified at every moment: I still want to go on, I still have strength, I'm still capable... The human project, a particularly complex version of life, falls and rises again and again, until it definitely falls. While it lasts, it's a commitment. The same as the French poet Paul Valéry, in his Marine Cemetery, glimpsed with joyful astonishment before the sea that never ceases to recreate itself, the waves that break in without truce... from where?
Human life: a crazy and laborious endeavor, full of noise and fury, but also of light and poetry. Every day is a task, as Ortega y Gasset reminded us: the task of building ourselves by projecting ourselves towards the nothingness of the future, of making our way through the infinity of possibilities (Heidegger would say), of inventing ourselves (Sartre would say)... Can there be a greater mystery? than freedom, a purer expression of the complexity of the human? All determinism is the dream of a return to simplicity, which contradicts us but at the same time calms us down. Every time we discover something that conditions us, we seem to rest a little. “I am a rebel because the world made me like this”, Jeanette sang so many years ago, moving us with that air of a sad and desolate girl. But after each determinism the possibility of choosing appears again: perhaps the world made you rebellious, but behaving as such, or not, is your decision. Even pushing everything to rebellion, you could choose to oppose it. “I can't even conceive of a life without rebellion, so deep was the mark I received. How could I choose what I do not conceive? How everything unheard of is chosen: by commitment. By creative will.
In that election against the grain is where ethics is forged. When we let ourselves be carried away by determinisms, we assume simplicity: letting what conditions us do. That is the probable, and therefore the easy. It is the world choosing for us, pushing us in its flood. Our conditioning accounts for a good part of what we are, of course, therein lies the basis of all the human sciences, which seek those predictable regularities of our behavior. They explain to us, then, but they do not justify us. To justify ourselves, we need a choice, that is, there must be consciousness and freedom. A predetermined human being cannot justify itself, it simply acts by natural programming. It lacks even the most characteristically human. If you can't help but be cruel, for example, then you are literally inhuman.
But if you can avoid it, if you can choose something else, then you go back to the core of your humanity. In return, you can no longer take refuge in determinisms. Sartre called bad faith that fallacious resource behind which we so often hide our decisions. "Man is what he does with what they made of him," she declared with unprecedented lucidity. Condemned to freedom, without possible compromises, we are left alone with our responsibility. Accepting it is a start. It is to assume that, definitively, we have been expelled from simplicity; that our heritage is complexity.
Someone who gives his life to save another person's is a glorious example of that option for complexity. If we admire his feat it is precisely because it goes against determinisms. Or maybe there is a deeper, more secret, more complex determinism that drives us to that exceptionality that is altruism? Social psychologists have suggested the possibility that we carry altruism in our genes, and explain that it could be a behavior that favored our survival as a species. Seen this way, heroism does not seem so admirable. However, our hero still had a choice, and his decision was probably not easy: to lose everything so that someone else, perhaps a stranger, can gain something... Even considering a mere hidden struggle of genes, there is always the decision that chooses to go in favor of some to the detriment of others (because genes also have their dilemmas). Courage and cowardice are our responses to conditioning; we can understand both, but we find one better than the other. That assessment sums up ethics.
Are we to conclude, then, that difficult is always better, as some have said? Not necessarily. Rather, you have to think about it the other way around: the best is always difficult; and probably, most of the time, it is more than the worst. A detailed revenge operation is difficult; forgiving, surely, is more. However, I am afraid that Nietzsche would not agree, and would consider forgiveness a weakness typical of the faint-hearted: after all, by forgiving we expose ourselves less to reprisals from our enemies, we opt for the security of compromise. You can forgive for weakness, but if we are weak, forgiving may be the smartest thing to do. Back to simplicity? May be. But choice, after all. Something to be gained and something to be lost. That is what is hard, José Antonio Marina would say, and it is no less so because we have chosen what is best for us.
Death is simple; life is hard. Within life, thinking and choosing for oneself, taking responsibility for doing so, is even more difficult. What to think of the abused woman who forgives and ends up murdered by her aggressor spouse? Maybe the hard part for her would have been to break that unhealthy relationship and leave. In this case, forgiveness -perhaps the result of fear- became more bearable, and choosing it was her downfall. She surely needed help, surely undoing her fateful bond was too big for her. She was the victim and that is why it seems to us that her murderer was the real culprit. However, putting yourself in the victim's place is also a choice. Understandable, of course justifiable, but a choice nonetheless. You can, you must help those who act out of weakness, but ultimately there will always be a margin that we cannot, must not reach: that of freedom. The margin of complexity that belongs exclusively to each human being.
We cannot escape complexity, any more than we can escape entropy, which is the relentless return to simplicity. As we cannot stop being while we are, nor prevent what we are from ceasing to be one day. Ours is to pass, ours is to choose: joy of complexity.
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