20 Response

The question was posed to me regarding a possible response I might have to the rhetorical question at the end of my 14th blog text, from the 4th of March. What I personally believe about it. Whether I might not yet search, even strive, for happiness or (at least) contentment.

Surrounding all the contention and relativism of the terms “happiness,” “desire,” “contentment,” “love,” or also “help” (to name just one concretely meaningful value), one fact yet remains certain and incontrovertible. It stands apart and beyond words and all of philosophy: death. Death relativizes even relativism and scatters it like dust in the wind. Even existentialism placed this phenomenon at the center of its thinking: that we are always only underway towards death, the finitude and limitless of mankind. Pascal brought this fact to our consciousness quite emphatically and early.i

Thus should our generalizable—that is, valid for everyone—goal be to avoid death as much as possible in ourselves and in others.
In ourselves, that is, in that one deals with one’s own body responsibly. That one protects it, cares for it, nourishes it. In others in that one inflicts no harm also to others’ bodies. That one does not seek to extinguish whole peoples with war and violence and civil strife. I’m thinking at the moment of the posters that I saw today in the display windows of the former music library at Charlottenplatz: Death in Syria – how much longer?

All other derivations from this goal—avoiding death as well as possible—are relative. Each as he or she wants and can: a life of desire or asceticism, striving or self-sufficient, Buddhistic or hedonistic, rich or poor, with or without other people, industrious or disinclined to work, etc..

The theological question remains yet excluded: whether we might have any influence at all over our own death. Whether we might not be led by some all-mighty fate—led day-to-day by angels and patron saints and a loving god, or also in the sense of Antiquity bestowed with a thread of destiny, the length and solidity of which is already spun by the Fates at the moment of our birth, and which—finally, when the time comes—will be cut by the goddess Atropos.

I also find Plato’s mythological idea interesting (in the telling of the “he” at the end of The Republic), that we “resolve” (choose) the path of fate at a certain point in our lives—sometimes sooner, sometimes later—and thereafter must follow it irrevocably. That sounds very little like freedom and self-determination. Nevertheless (says Plato) it need not be a bad path, so long as one follows the virtues provided to us by tradition and religion along the way.

I think this point in time, when one chooses one’s fortune/destiny, is for most people somewhere in the age between twenty and thirty: profession, love, family—they define the subsequent path. Even finding one’s place and settling down (together) sometimes plays a weighty role here.

iCf. Reinhold Urmetzer, “Über die Sinnfrage” Chapter 5 “Pascal lesen” (ISBN 978-3-00034547-0).