If we are all just condemned to death, then why should we still live?

Question

This maybe just a question thought while drinking a coffee at a balcony. But it caught me defenseless. Just as how it caught those who committed suicide.

With all our efforts to find meaning in life, just as the time that we have found it in our old age, then is the time that we face death, and realize that these meanings in living are all just for nothing.

Or are they?

What if the belief of an eternal life is just a scapegoat to the terror of nonexistence? What if it is just a comfort? Should one still want to live amidst all of these sufferings and pain, where in non-existing, we cant be experiencing any more pain or suffering?

We can find answers in Norris Clarke's Book on Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologica. Yes, We experience suffering because we have free will, we experience pain(which is a positive being) because we are not robots, and we are all interacting with each others, all in an encompassed community of self relating, self actualizing beings, each with unique experiences.

But what if these are all just comforting arguments or lies in order to hide the terror(or the comfort) of death? What would morals or ethics say regarding this?

I haven't read any of Nietzshe's books regarding these. Please enlighten me.

Answer 1

Person A: "I want to live forever. Why can't I live forever?"

Person B: "You can live another 20 years."

Person A: "Is that all? Then why don't I just kill myself right now?"

Even setting aside questions of an immortal soul, it is pure irrationality to want to die now, simply because you are going to die eventually.

If there is any value in living, for life's own sake, then of course you would chose to go on living, even knowing that you will someday die. If there is any value of living for the sake of the good that you can do for others, then of course you would choose to go on living. If there is any value in the passing on of your thoughts and ideas to future generations, children, strangers - then of course you would choose to go on living.

If the terror of your eventual end is unendurable, and you would rather settle down now into a dark and dreamless sleep... Well, that seems rather short-sighted and maybe a little selfish, doesn't it? And wasn't that same dark and dreamless sleep the very thing you claimed to fear?

Answer 2

Many if not most of us at some point or other in life begin to entertain serious doubts about why being alive matters. It is an important question and indicates a level of seriousness in the questioner and deserves a response which might help to illuminate our predicament as humans with a somewhat constrained perspective on life.

In Spinoza's psychology, [parts 3-4-5 in his "Ethics"] he details the difference between 'imagination' and 'understanding'. Imagination is a state of mind where our emotions which he terms 'passions' exert a powerful negative influence on our thinking and self-image. These powerful 'impressions' which are stored in our memory come at us in a flurry of daydreams and nightmares. Their power consists in the fact that they involve no time element and more importantly that we essentially have no control over when or in what concatenation they will appear before our mind's-eye; once they become part of our memory they are stored there for as long as we are alive.

Spinoza urges us to learn to recognize these 'externally derived' influences and to learn to 'see' through them and to become self-initiated, not controlled by external forces. This involves a long, slow process and is not easy. I have become convinced that understanding the nature and origin of our daydreams, nightmares and basic fears, is in itself a comfort of a sort. Think of it as taking a bus-ride through a bizarre Fellini movie, try not to take them too seriously. Sometimes talking through this with a trained Counselor can help.

But if we can become successful we reach a tipping point where we begin to see life as a gift and being alive an honor. Life is difficult but please be assured we all have doubts and fears.

Spinoza said that the person who understands life does not fear death. Yes, this is a challenging proposition. But we need to give ourselves some slack and take each day slowly, focusing on the things that are important to us and beginning to believe in a potential future. CS

Answer 3

From a biological perspective we live to reproduce. We live to reproduce but that's kind of a boring answer...

The way I view it is that having a finite existence forces us to reproduce. Which allows us to make more finite lives, and those finite lives can create more finite lives and so on. So although we might die. We can still be arguably be alive in the form of future generations generations... in the form of genetic code.

So you are allowed to die once you reproduce and pass on behaviors to you children to assure that you live on.

Answer 4

The most rational reason is that, if you are alive, you can always choose to die, but if you are dead, you can never choose to be alive. This makes being alive favorable over being dead.

There is at least some evidence suggesting that living organisms are defined by their ability to optimize their own global entropy. In other words, we evolved to be able to maximize the number of choices that we will be able to make in the long term. For example, when you have very little money, and you are deciding where to eat, you can only make a few choices, because there are only a few restaurants within your price range. But when you have a lot of money, you can pretty much decide to eat wherever you want. So we favor having money over not having money because it opens up more possibilities, it allows us to have more things to choose from.

Death is exactly contrary to this. When we die, we can never make any choices ever again.

From this perspective, there is never a good reason to kill oneself. From the perspective of entropy, one can simulate the same effect by simply not making any more choices, while still leaving open the option to start making choices again.

Answer 5

People thinking about this might be interested in an article by Schaerer, Alec "Conceptual Conditions for Conceiving Life – a Solution for Grasping its Principle, not Mere Appearances" in: G. Palyi, C. Zucchi, L. Caglioti (Hrsg.) Fundamentals of Life; Paris: Elsevier pp. 589-624. This article won much praise. The author distinguishes the law or principle of death from the process of dying. Life can on principle not do without death because otherwise it would sufficate in its own discharge. Death does not exclude awareness, but that requires overcoming one's fundamental fears. One always has the free choice of what one likes to think and believe, but one cannot escape the consequences. In the last resort one always is compelled to abandon one’s illusions (another word for ‘mere beliefs’), but depending on one’s choice this occurs on two opposite paths: either by actively cognizing the nature of reality to the very end, developing adequate categories and conceptual instrumentation in what could be called a ‘mental death’, or by having to abandon the illusions through physical death as a result of the missed insights and thereby having harmed the material sphere (one’s own body, or the body of the planet, or now also the rest of the universe).