Death & The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.
Doesn’t this encompass the ultimate paradox/antinomy embedded in the existence of any particular human being. If you were in a position of having to cause pain and suffering to others [perhaps many others] in order that you would continue to exist, how far would you go?
All sorts of hypothetical thought experiments can pop up here. Imagine that you must choose between this or that terrible set of consequences or you will die yourself. Imagine it’s your own oblivion or the death of innocent children.
What is the right thing to do when the obliteration of “I” for all time to come is at stake. And here of course a faith in God or one or another religious outcome can make all the difference in the world.
And yet no matter how much you cherish the importance of your own continued existence, your death would be utterly lacking in significance if the universe – all there is – really is an essential “thing” that merely exists as a brute facticity.
So, you are a serious philosopher. What then to make of this. It’s like ILP itself. Some here put all of their philosophical eggs into and it appears on the verge of collapsing. Either [re the Kids] into irrelevancy in regard to philosophy or literally for any number of reasons those who own and operate it happen to have. And if it goes the way of the ponderers’s guild or e-philosophy or the old yahoo-philosophy groups, of what relevance is that to the rest of the universe?
“I” being the center of the universe from the perspective of the individual. And the individual being of utter, utter insignificance in the context of “all there is”.
It’s like the feeling that some get when a calamity befalls them and they want the whole world to take note of it. But the world just keeps spinning around and around in utter, utter indifference.
As for the “science of it all”, that only takes us back to the extent to which science is able to grapple with an explanation for Existence Itself.
And how profoundly, ineffably insignificant can “I” be in regard to that?