On Biological purpose
It was a ordinary day I suppose, but for some reason I was watching YouTube. I always tend to spend most of my spare time upon this activity. Wasting the day away. Watching many videos not always so educational. However, this particular video was about vanity. Looking back at life or rather more towards it, the narrator brought me his worldview and his question. What is the meaning of it? Why am I here? He spoke particullary about death, and the strain of living a somewhat meaning-less life.
A love letter to the poet and writer Lev Tolstoj. Looking back at his own life, he wrote in A confession that there may be four possibilities in which a man of his age would have dealt with this fundamental question. The first is connected to the concept of ignorance. ‘They see neither the dragon that is waiting for them, nor the mice that are gnawning away at the bush from which they are clinging, and they lick the drops of honey.’ An retelling of an old eastern legend. We can imagine the moments of sweet bliss of ignorance even in our own lives. Secondly, the author tells us about the second method. Escape or epicureanism. While we know about the hopelessness of life. we still accept it as a fact that we are not yet there. Again, ‘enjoying the blessings we have without looking at the dragon or the mice, and of licking the honey of the best possible way’ I must agree with Tolstoy on his observation that most people use this method to not succumb to hopelessness. Thinking about it myself. I understood that the condition of this particular type of vanity is permanently suppresed somehow. We have to search or be in contact with the fact of Death. I suppose It was this one moment in which I read ‘What is better, cheap happiness or sublime suffering’ from Fjodor Dostoyevky, a contemporary of Tolstoy. That the fact of living must be connected to Death. I must confess that when I want to forget, I focuss more on the sweet dew of life, even if its temporarly.
The third method Tolstoy describes is ‘Through strength and energy’ Realizing that life and the world by a extend is utterly evil and senseless. The person may be asking the question as such: If I do not like the room, why not walk out? Tolstoy decribes that people fit to undermine this ‘cruel joke’ even in their prime of their lives was ‘the most worthy mode of escape’. It was along time ago that I myself thought about this strange heroic feat. It was in a field in Finland, that to me was the first time I felt nature. The wind was blowing through the grass fields, and especially the leaves of the howling trees. That moment I knew, I was not among the strong, but more like the fourth method described. Escaping through weakness. Tolstoy decribes it as such: ‘People belonging to this category know that death if preferable to life but, lacking the strength to act rationally and bring a quick and to the deception by killing themselves, they seem to wait for something’ Tolstoy confessed he perhaps belonged to this category himself.
This brings the question or rather what our biological purpose may be. Vanity, or thinking within my finite nature. The act of procreation, progress or 1 + 1 = 2 must be holding some fundamental truth? material reality, the things we see and touch are part of a endlessly complex maze. Thinking of living as the world should be, not the way it is, just not to get lost. The people we live with and love and hate may well be cloaked in his material reality. Men’s duality and purpose is decribed by Dostojevski in Notes from underground. The underground men asks what can be expected of us ‘since he is a being endowed with strange qualities?' This qualitative strangeness he describes eerily as:
‘Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano.’
As we cannot be pleased with our selves. Sit quitely on the same chair and watch. I may ask, Is there something missing? The question has sticked to me for years (could it be something internally?), but can be asked as such: Do you always want verification for what you do and think? Even though it will put yourself into an illusion of how the world actually is.
Likewise, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre decribes in his existentialist play No exit the concept of The Gaze, In which a man and two women are transported to Hell. A single room with three chairs and a bronze statue guarded by a single valet or gatekeeper. The three are confronted by each other sins and reason why they are in Hell. Eventually the man is concerned with how people will remember him, and the first women becomes dependend on the man as she cannot see her own reflection or image. Only the last women realizes this cruel joke and accepts her consequences and actions, eventually declaring that ‘I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become. Hell is—other people! You are -- your life, and nothing else. So this is hell.’ The purpose what we can call life may be as well be anchored In other peoples perspective. Perhaps In our own reflection we cannot find any answer. Turning outside of the realm of human concern It can be as Sigmund Freud decribes as the feeling of connectiveness. In his book Civilisation and its discontents this feeling is decribed as ‘oceanic' or a sensation of infinity. Eventually being one with the external world.
Perhaps, both can be true as we are limited to our understanding and perspectives as beings on a truelly gigantic scale. Both intertwining with each other from time to time. As true biological purpose cannot be indicated. This is, I think the most fundamental for a dream so very much humiliating. Would an untimely death be more terrible than an abundance? Take a path, because we may not see in the dark.
