The literal definition of 'exist' is "to have being in a specified place or under certain conditions; be found; occur".
The literal definition of 'live' is "to have a life rich in experience; to remain in human memory or record".
Søren Kierkegaard based his existentialist philosophy on the idea that an individual is responsible for giving his or her life meaning and living it passionately. All other things that may get in the way (ie. boredom, despair) should be disregarded, although they may be challenging.
Essence.
Existence precedes essence. We are and then we become. One of Kierkegaard's successors in this claim, Simone de Beauvoir, developed the idea "one is not born a woman, but becomes one". She followed the idea that humans are born without any identity or value, but bring it upon themselves throughout life in the choices they make and the people they associate themselves with and so on and so forth. I can be born with the female parts and sit and wait and grow and eat and sleep, but if that's all I do, am I a woman? Am I anything? Then the thought may arise- "Well, who is to say what being a woman is?" Society. Society says what a woman is and what she does and how she is supposed to think. You may not agree with the standard- but it is what it is.
Again- am I anything?
I sit, I eat, I breathe, sleep, think.
But what am I?
I'm a human being lacking a purpose.
“We live but a fraction of our lives”- Henry David Thoreau
What does it mean to live?
Is it enough to merely exist? To sit somewhere and just be?
What will you be remembered for? Will anyone remember you?
Our lives are like land mines waiting for someone. something. anything. to cross it's path.
We're not invincible. We do not live forever. Why would anyone want to just exist?
To live is to make an impact. It doesn't have to be huge, it doesn't have to change the world forever. But to change one person's life... to change your own life (hopefully for the better) is to live.
You must become what you want to be.
To wake up one morning and claim, "today I'm going to become the richest man in the world!" is absurd unless you already have some sort of get-rich-quick scheme ready to go; waiting for you to push the "ON" button.
It takes work. Life. Takes. Work.
We need to find something to live for.
Someone to live for.
Someone. Something. Anything.
"I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am"- Rene Descartes
We cannot simply be here. We need to make some sort of impact in this world. By nature humans have a desire to get out and learn and explore. Open our minds to new ideas. Accept technological advances, new theories and the evidence supporting, think for ourselves.
Help ourselves.
Help others.
Love and be loved.
It's all we have in this beautiful, weary world.
“The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person”- Unknown
Let's take it a step further, shall we?
ReplyDeleteExistence boils down to the fact that we're clumps simply clumps of quarks and neutrinos that took 14 billion years to eventually look back at it all and wonder why it all happened. And even the fact that those quarks and neutrinos exist the way we see them is questionable. The determinist thinks that we are slaves of the laws of physics, and that we will all inevitably end up where we set out to go when the universe was set into motion. And they're probably right. We have this illusion of "free will" that we came up with to feel better about ourselves by convincing each other that we can decide what we want to do and be in life. Our neurons and our biology beg to differ.
Another way of seeing it is the fact that we might just be brains floating in ether or what-have-you, and the world we are conscious of (perhaps even our consciousness itself) is being projected to us. That is to say that the world we know is just an illusion. Strip down the absurdity of that claim and you get what I like to consider: the fact that our consciousness can only be defined by the impression we get from the world around us. I won't get into that. What I'm trying to say here is that the more we dig into the inner workings of the world, the more realize how little control we have over it, much less ourselves.
That's a really nihilistic way of looking at everything, but I see it as a reason for asking this: What difference does it make?
So what if free will is an illusion? So what if this universe doesn't really exist the way we know it? People who waste their time trying to disprove our existence are the ones who completely miss the point of existence itself in the first place. The fact is that we're here, in one way or another. Though it's important for us to ask and discuss these big questions, we should consider the fact that we're a part of this world as we perceive it, and that we evolved in a way that lends itself to that perception. Our genes want us to preserve our posterity for future generations, but our species has transcended that basic need. We have this desire to pass on more than simply our genes. What we pass on propagates between bloodlines and heredities. Progress. Society is an organism that thrives on human progress. In order for it to happen, individuals need to see the big picture and make something of themselves.
We have no reason for being here. The challenge we face is to make a reason.
I probably completely missed the point of your post, and I probably contradicted myself a few times, but this was fun to write.