“I’m not saying you’re wrong in what you’re saying”
“I’m not a teacher, you’re not a student”
Seriously, are you ignoring what I write, or are you trolling?
Your answer is not the answer the original questioner in context was looking for. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I know wrong answers. This is not some contradiction or hypocrisy or sophistry. There are very, very many questions I don’t know the answer to. But for each one, there are many more answers that I know do not answer the question.
I don’t know how you interpreted it, but I think you answer it in a way that wouldn’t satisfy someone moved to ask it. I’ve said (or tried to say) several times that I don’t have the answer that would do so.
I think this is an interesting point. But I don’t think necessarily you have to assume a directing mind for meaning or purpose - although many people will do so, of course. You could also see it as questioning how to work negatively-perceived events into your own self-made meaning and purpose consistently.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to come to terms with death… but trying to do so by being intellectually dishonest about it, seems cheap… don’t ask “why do we die”… ask “how should we deal with death?”…
But to take it further, if we are honest about the physical facts and accept the narratives that we create are really our own homegrown intersubjective truths that we use to make sense of the world, I don’t think it’s intellectually dishonest to say (e.g.) “People die to remind us that we are still living”. I wouldn’t recommend this particular example as, for among other reasons, it confusingly applies intentionality to the dead, but it’s not a religiously-based abdication of truth, just a narrative we supply to ‘place’ death in a meaningful context to our life. It’s certainly not a causal claim appropriate to a “how” question, though, and the point I’ve been trying to make is that it doesn’t need to be.
Edit: I think actually that that echoes what you say.
I see no problem and find myself in perfect agreement with what you just said… so long as it is understood the way you meant it… the danger is, of course, that it might invite misunderstanding.
Zorba has it both ways. He lives his life and then, from time to time, he contemplates it. Basil, however, is there to find a new answer. And there is never only one.
The problem, of course, is this: In living our lives we sometimes smash into the lives of others. Then we have to figure out the least dysfuntional way in which to do so. And here there is never one answer either.
And if human existence is a blink of an eye on the scale that is evolution, just think how insignificant it must be when the scale is of cosmological proportions.
But everything is necessarily linked to the bigger questions I suppose is where my point was leading. You can’t search for knowledge but consciously put a cap on it and go ‘that’s enough’, curiosity is too powerful.
Yes, to bigger and bigger questions, indeed. We can start with, “what is existence?” And we can end with, “what is the relationship between all that exist and ‘I’?”
True, but when most folks use the word evolution they are referring to the evolution of life on earth. Yet this is but an infinitesimally tiny speck in the evolution of the universe itself.
And what if the universe is but a speck in the evolution of something even more unimaginably gigantic still?
I believe that you misunderstood what Zorba’s real question was. If death means non-existence, then why exist at all? Everything you know, everything you learned, all your memories, who you are, what you are, is going to cease to exist when you die. Nothing will be left of you but your corpse and even that is not permanent before it turns into dust. So what is the point of living if you are going to lose it all in the end anyway? In other words, why does anyone die is really asking why does anyone live if they are going to die? What is the point of life when we are all going to die anyway regardless of the cause of death? This is the real question that causes a lot of people agony.
In other words, a question in which there are many, many completely conflicting and contradictory answers. No one answer is really any more reasonable than any other. But, as always, we can easily convince ourselves this is not the case at all. We can choose one answer and believe it is more reasonable than all of the others. And then, for us, it is.
Back then I, among others, used to post a lot of “new topics” in the philosophy forum. And that is because back then there were considerably more folks who actually chose to exchange philosophy at ILP. However we might have construed what that entailed.
Now, of course, the place is veritably overrun with the Kids and the huffers and the puffers and the retorters. And the bullshitters.
