Downfall
I don't know what to make of death. For quite a while, I think I really did believe that there was some sort of afterlife, and that I would, if I had faith, go to heaven once I perished. But then I started to doubt, and started giving thought to the possibility that perhaps there really wasn't a light at the end of the tunnel after all; in fact, that there would be no tunnel at all. I started using this line of thinking to give myself some sort of confidence and adventurousness, trying new things because, after all, you only get one shot. At this point, I think that I had told several friends that I had finally rejected belief in a deity, and I assume that at least some of them assumed I had adopted atheism.
At the time, this wasn't completely true, however, and I even doubted my doubt at times. I toyed with all sorts of religious concepts, treating the matter as some sort of intellectual playground where I could bounce around interesting, if somewhat surreptitious and now, I think, silly concepts. I kept the issue on a back burner on my mind, never really devoting much mental time to it, since, after all, who wants to spend life pondering what comes after?
But then a select couple events caused me to give the issue thought, and I came to the conclusion that the physical (and what kind else could there be?) evidence supported nothing but the complete absence of any sort of afterlife, hellish, nirvanic, purgatoric, or otherwise. A complete absence is extremely difficult--impossible, really--to comprehend. Even sleep, which at least for periods we at least have no memory of, ends and we awake, and it's almost as if no time has passed since we dozed off. But to cease mental functioning completely, _forever_?
A friend of mine has described his perspective as what it was like before we were born. True, what is now me was at one point some DNA, and before that a few proteins, and before that, a few compounds/atoms, but it eventually came together and created a mass of meat and bones capable of conscious thought. But, someday, probably not much more than 50 years from now (barring even greater advancements in medicine), the consciousness running the show will no longer be. Imagine! to not exist. It's impossible by necessity of existence as a precursor to thought in the first place.
Death terrifies me, and the inevitable march towards the abyss is downright paralytic. For years, I'd put off considering this, and let its seriousness pass by, unconsidered. Sure, barring nothing else, I'll inevitably succumb to cancer, but the thought that merely driving to my parents' house and back could bring an end to my entire existence is downright scary.
It's terrifying, but now that I've convinced myself as to this, there's nothing I can do in anyway to stop it. At least when I called myself a Christian I could work at being more faithful with the possibility of some sort of eternal reward. An eternal existence is almost as horrible and as impossible to comprehend (well, that's a grammatical foible. Meh.) as nonexistence.
As a digression, let us consider the Christian view of heaven. You head up there, and, we're told, you pretty much spend your entire time worshiping. One, this seems to eliminate any illusion of free will we might have down here, and two, even if it really was just pure bliss, isn't that really just a form of coercion? Once in heaven, is it possible for one to break free, utter non serviam, and fall from heaven just like Lucifer? What distinguishes us from the seraphim but free will? Or do they also have free will, as exemplified by Lucifer? One wonders, but (un)fortunately, it doesn't really matter.
One can grieve for the deceased for years after their death, but why can't one grieve even before they've expired? The two sure things in life are, after all, death and taxes, and you know that one day, your lover/mother/sister/son will cease to be. Why not grieve for them now and get it over with? Besides the obvious severe melancholia this would be liable to instill, why should one grieve at all? Sure, your grandson is dying, but you probably won't be around to grieve for it anyway. So why bother? I'm sure there's some biological reason we've developed grief, or at least a catalyst for its incorporation into our psyche.
I suppose it's just something we all have to come to terms with, and I've either gotten a head start, delayed my reaction, or have just been overly sensitive to the entire thing. I don't hear many other people my age obsessing over it.
This serves as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, I, upon doing anything, ask myself, "what does it matter, in the end we're all dead anyway," but then I consider the fact that these 70 or so years of time I have at my disposal is all I have, and I should probably use them to their fullest.
___________________________________
Downfall was an amazing film. It risks portraying some of the higher Nazi officials as a little bit too, ah, human (what a world!), but one realizes that it was actually showing them as humans, but as some rather deranged/deluded humans at that. Take Hitler's refusal to leave Berlin. All logic pointed to leaving it for the Russians, but he refused. So many of those young men continued to fight long past reason, and many, just as Hitler did, ended their own lives. Honor and prestige is a terrible, terrible thing, and I'm surprised we haven't adapted out of it yet. How does it propagate the species to have young people with plenty of time left to breed to have them off themselves without a chance to spawn offspring? There may be an argument to be made here for the species as a whole somehow taking into account overpopulation and planning for the good of the whole, but that'd be somewhat of a stretch. Still, if a species were to somehow accidentally have some sort of genomic mechanism for recognizing when the population had become almost too diverse (as some sort of genetic indication of an overpopulated habitat?) to activate some sort of mechanism in a significant number of individuals to cause them to start killing each other. Or perhaps it's just a trait in a small fraction of the population causing them to be more likely to murder, and so for so many people, enough of them are guaranteed to be eliminated so as to not use up all resources. I suppose a species without this trait would be less likely to survive... Still, that is amateurish evolutionary biology at best, and I of all people wouldn't place much stock in it.
___________________
It seems I can't go one full regular semester without making some huge change in plans as far as academics go. Hopefully I don't end up trying out everything, only to discover that academia really, really, really isn't where I belong. (Who says I have to belong anywhere?) I think I'll at least take another philosophy course or two over the summer, and may take more along with English classes and possibly add a second degree. Lord knows I'll have enough credits.
I say this because as I take more and more literature classes, I've learned that the farther you go with it, the more and more literary "theory" gets thrown out there, and, by and large, I think most of it's a crock of shit. Even if it's correct, what does it really matter that the ghost in Hamlet is a phallic symbol? What's the point? Sure, there's that little voice in me telling me, hey, you could always exploit that system, write a few novels, and live off the royalties, but then reason steps in and tells me that it's a flight of fancy, and that as with most forms of art, it's not how talented you are at, say, writing, but more to do with your skill at fellating your critics and editors. Philosophy, on the other hand, serves to help answer (or just ask) questions that I bring myself to care about (or at least to bear spending time with), or at least certain fields. Phenomenology, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ontology, for instance, are subjects that at least interest me and have a bit more, ah, bearing. They probably won't bring about any great change, but I'm more interested in knowledge and understanding than improvement. Meh.
At the time, this wasn't completely true, however, and I even doubted my doubt at times. I toyed with all sorts of religious concepts, treating the matter as some sort of intellectual playground where I could bounce around interesting, if somewhat surreptitious and now, I think, silly concepts. I kept the issue on a back burner on my mind, never really devoting much mental time to it, since, after all, who wants to spend life pondering what comes after?
But then a select couple events caused me to give the issue thought, and I came to the conclusion that the physical (and what kind else could there be?) evidence supported nothing but the complete absence of any sort of afterlife, hellish, nirvanic, purgatoric, or otherwise. A complete absence is extremely difficult--impossible, really--to comprehend. Even sleep, which at least for periods we at least have no memory of, ends and we awake, and it's almost as if no time has passed since we dozed off. But to cease mental functioning completely, _forever_?
A friend of mine has described his perspective as what it was like before we were born. True, what is now me was at one point some DNA, and before that a few proteins, and before that, a few compounds/atoms, but it eventually came together and created a mass of meat and bones capable of conscious thought. But, someday, probably not much more than 50 years from now (barring even greater advancements in medicine), the consciousness running the show will no longer be. Imagine! to not exist. It's impossible by necessity of existence as a precursor to thought in the first place.
Death terrifies me, and the inevitable march towards the abyss is downright paralytic. For years, I'd put off considering this, and let its seriousness pass by, unconsidered. Sure, barring nothing else, I'll inevitably succumb to cancer, but the thought that merely driving to my parents' house and back could bring an end to my entire existence is downright scary.
It's terrifying, but now that I've convinced myself as to this, there's nothing I can do in anyway to stop it. At least when I called myself a Christian I could work at being more faithful with the possibility of some sort of eternal reward. An eternal existence is almost as horrible and as impossible to comprehend (well, that's a grammatical foible. Meh.) as nonexistence.
As a digression, let us consider the Christian view of heaven. You head up there, and, we're told, you pretty much spend your entire time worshiping. One, this seems to eliminate any illusion of free will we might have down here, and two, even if it really was just pure bliss, isn't that really just a form of coercion? Once in heaven, is it possible for one to break free, utter non serviam, and fall from heaven just like Lucifer? What distinguishes us from the seraphim but free will? Or do they also have free will, as exemplified by Lucifer? One wonders, but (un)fortunately, it doesn't really matter.
One can grieve for the deceased for years after their death, but why can't one grieve even before they've expired? The two sure things in life are, after all, death and taxes, and you know that one day, your lover/mother/sister/son will cease to be. Why not grieve for them now and get it over with? Besides the obvious severe melancholia this would be liable to instill, why should one grieve at all? Sure, your grandson is dying, but you probably won't be around to grieve for it anyway. So why bother? I'm sure there's some biological reason we've developed grief, or at least a catalyst for its incorporation into our psyche.
I suppose it's just something we all have to come to terms with, and I've either gotten a head start, delayed my reaction, or have just been overly sensitive to the entire thing. I don't hear many other people my age obsessing over it.
This serves as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, I, upon doing anything, ask myself, "what does it matter, in the end we're all dead anyway," but then I consider the fact that these 70 or so years of time I have at my disposal is all I have, and I should probably use them to their fullest.
___________________________________
Downfall was an amazing film. It risks portraying some of the higher Nazi officials as a little bit too, ah, human (what a world!), but one realizes that it was actually showing them as humans, but as some rather deranged/deluded humans at that. Take Hitler's refusal to leave Berlin. All logic pointed to leaving it for the Russians, but he refused. So many of those young men continued to fight long past reason, and many, just as Hitler did, ended their own lives. Honor and prestige is a terrible, terrible thing, and I'm surprised we haven't adapted out of it yet. How does it propagate the species to have young people with plenty of time left to breed to have them off themselves without a chance to spawn offspring? There may be an argument to be made here for the species as a whole somehow taking into account overpopulation and planning for the good of the whole, but that'd be somewhat of a stretch. Still, if a species were to somehow accidentally have some sort of genomic mechanism for recognizing when the population had become almost too diverse (as some sort of genetic indication of an overpopulated habitat?) to activate some sort of mechanism in a significant number of individuals to cause them to start killing each other. Or perhaps it's just a trait in a small fraction of the population causing them to be more likely to murder, and so for so many people, enough of them are guaranteed to be eliminated so as to not use up all resources. I suppose a species without this trait would be less likely to survive... Still, that is amateurish evolutionary biology at best, and I of all people wouldn't place much stock in it.
___________________
It seems I can't go one full regular semester without making some huge change in plans as far as academics go. Hopefully I don't end up trying out everything, only to discover that academia really, really, really isn't where I belong. (Who says I have to belong anywhere?) I think I'll at least take another philosophy course or two over the summer, and may take more along with English classes and possibly add a second degree. Lord knows I'll have enough credits.
I say this because as I take more and more literature classes, I've learned that the farther you go with it, the more and more literary "theory" gets thrown out there, and, by and large, I think most of it's a crock of shit. Even if it's correct, what does it really matter that the ghost in Hamlet is a phallic symbol? What's the point? Sure, there's that little voice in me telling me, hey, you could always exploit that system, write a few novels, and live off the royalties, but then reason steps in and tells me that it's a flight of fancy, and that as with most forms of art, it's not how talented you are at, say, writing, but more to do with your skill at fellating your critics and editors. Philosophy, on the other hand, serves to help answer (or just ask) questions that I bring myself to care about (or at least to bear spending time with), or at least certain fields. Phenomenology, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ontology, for instance, are subjects that at least interest me and have a bit more, ah, bearing. They probably won't bring about any great change, but I'm more interested in knowledge and understanding than improvement. Meh.
posted by Nathan at 2:20 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home