Re: Why live rather than die?
What follows is an excerpt from a private exchange that I am sharing with the permission of my correspondent. I am not disclosing their private information.
why live rather than die? hungry people want food and full people don’t, but both hungry and full people can agree that some foods are healthier than others, and food preferences differ between people. why fight to eat if you could choose never to go hungry again with no perceivable consequences?
There are three parts to my thinking on this matter: metaphysical (what is), epistemological (what we know), and practical (what to do). Metaphysically, I cannot tell what death is. Do we have a case of something being caused by nothing? Something being done in nothing? Something becoming nothing? In all those cases, I can only think of “something”. The world always is. Not only I lack the imagination to consider a case of nothingness, in the absolute sense, but I cannot even describe such a state. Calling it a “state” is already a description of something, of a given pattern or structure, not nothing. I can only ever conceive of nothing indirectly as the opposite of something, though I have no means of grasping it as such. The “as such” makes me wonder if there is any single thing that I can understand as such. I think not, for all things coexist, and all that becomes does so in the interplay of things that are becoming.
What I can say about death is that it is the apparent discontinuation of a given form of being, though not of being as such. What we experience is a cycle of transfiguration: forms come and go, yet the coming and going, the essence of life—the set of conditions in which cause, pattern, and structure is even possible—is always there. What is death in this regard? I cannot say.
At the epistemological level, we face the problem of making a case for the counterfactual. I cannot, for example, die to test how it is and then come back to describe it to you (assuming that giving you a description is a sufficient substitute for the experience itself, which I think it is not). There is no way for me to understand death in the way I experience life, such as this very moment. Therefore, I have no means of knowing whether death has any consequences on the given organism or not. Perhaps the organism goes through a process of disintegration, though the constituents are not becoming nothing. Which brings us back to the metaphysical conundrum. What is? What is not?
In practical terms, I find life to be a bag of mixed results. There are beautiful and ugly parts to it. My experience tells me that even in the lowest of lows, I can still affect my outlook. Looking at a sunset, listening to the birds, feeling the cold breeze of this February evening… all those little things that we tend to forget remind me how there are fulfilling experiences to be had. Plus, experience has shown me that I cannot anticipate the future and pretend to know it all.. I had plans to move in a certain direction only for life to put me on a completely different path. At first, I thought this was miserable but then I realised how wrong and narrow-minded I was. I allowed myself the chance to keep an open mind, to try to find the little things that touch my soul, and to be balanced in my attitude. It is this growth, this sense of becoming that which I could not have fathomed, which I appreciate the most.
I can spend my time worrying about matters that are beyond my reach; matters which are obscure and for which this life does not provide enough means to find answers. Though I feel that I will not achieve anything because achieving something is inconsequential. I then choose to take phenomena as they come and to smile even when I can no longer see the light.
Take care,
Prot