As usual, I return to existence for that is the basis
for any thought or philosophy that we have.
Existence is something we work through and discover about,
but existence also has an historical context that should be discussed.
Existence as punishment.
Now I don’t claim any of this is new or something different then what others
has thought of, but it is another attempt to make sense of it.
Buddhism and Christianity for example treat existence as punishment.
Recall the Buddha and his teachings. The point of existence as to escape
suffering and by becoming enlighten, we can escape the ongoing rebirth
and death of life, reincarnation. We are ever being born and reborn and
all the while, we suffer. We suffer as humans and we suffer as animals
and we suffer every time we return to this earth. To end the endless
cycle of being reborn, we must achieve Enlightenment. That will put an end
to the constant cycle of rebirth and suffering. That philosophy/religion
is anti-life. It is an attempt to end the suffering we have in life.
Christianity is also anti-life, but its opposition to life is of a different sort.
The goal of life is not life but to rejoin with god in heaven. To join at the right
hand of god and spend eternity in the reflection and contemplation of god.
(this idea of the point of heaven is a direct steal from the Greek philosophers.
They thought that life was best spent in the contemplation of existence and god)
Now recall the Medieval ages when man was anti-body and anti-life.
Recall that many in the church felt the need to punish the body in
various actions such as in flagellation of the body for religious
purposes. To deny the flesh was a major fixture of the medieval man
and this denial carried over to even our time. Recall the
programs directed to youth about abstentions. It worked until it didn’t work
and for the most part, abstention programs failed.
Today, we still have an feeling or idea that to deny the body pleasure
is an positive behavior and not a negative behavior.
This idea of abstention is still strong in conservatives but not so much
in liberals.
To deny the body and place primacy in the soul is still a fixture in our
modern society. Jesus said:
“What does it profit a man if he gains the world and yet loses his soul”
so existence has many different aspects. For the religious, the body means
less then the soul. But we are body, we cannot deny that simple fact.
to paraphrase Jesus: “What does it matter for you to gain your soul if
you lose your body”?
This entire debate hinges on one point, is the soul eternal?
If the soul is eternal, then the religious is right but, but
if the soul or what we think of as the soul, ends with death,
then those who engage with the body over the soul is right.
As of this moment, there is no evidence that the soul or what we think
of as the soul is eternal…….We have bodies, that much we know.
but do we have eternal souls? I cannot subscribe to that point of view.
For the simple reason, that I cannot discover anything that is eternal.
Even the universe is finite. It began and in billions of years, it will end.
Just as our solar system began at some point 14 billion years ago, it will
end. As we humans beings began at some point and at some point, we end.
I cannot find anything that last forever, is eternal.
And because we are finite beings, we must not only engage with the soul but
with the body. We must be in harmony and in moderation with both soul
and body.
So we return to the original point, that of existence being a punishment.
I cannot hold that point of view that existence is a punishment because
existence is not just a punishment but something that has
worthy pleasures and goals that make existence worth living.
Life is not about suffering, it has suffering in it, but the main
function of life is not to escape suffering, but life is to embrace
and overcome our suffering and pain and despair and unhappiness.
we can turn any negative aspect of our life which is suffering
and pain and despair and unhappiness into something positive and
worth remembering. For suffering and despair and pain and unhappiness
is part of this thing we call existence and it is a negative, a dark aspect
of life… but as in the two aspects of life, the light and the dark,
light needs the dark to reveal the how lifegiving and astonishing the what
the light shows us. For the dark needs the light to reveal that life is two parts,
that of light and that of dark. To make sense of our existence, we need both
light and dark. To understand our existence we must accept both the light
and the dark. The light part of existence which is beautiful and wonderful
and uplifting and the dark part of existence which is the pain and suffering
and despair that each of us feels at some point in our life. We must have both
parts to help us appreciate what our life is and what is possible for us.
The exuberance of life is tempered by the realization of the negative, dark
aspects of life which is the pain and suffering that accompanies life.
We cannot just have the light part of life, we must, must have the
dark side of life and that allows us to enjoy the beauty and
promise and possibilities of life all the more.
So existence has two sides, the positive and light side
and the dark, negative side and we must have both to
correctly understand what life is……
Kropotkin