From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Thu Apr 14 2005 - 19:50:45 BST
Dear Ham,
Do I miss something essential when I summarize your essay at
www.essentialism.net/balance.htm in the following quotes?
1) 'the rejection of transcendence deprives at least 16% of our population
of
any meaning or purpose for the life-experience'
2) 'man is the only animal equipped to contemplate his fate and discriminate
among life's values'
3) 'were we to have a choice to continue in any form thereafter, it would be
only natural to choose affirmatively'
4) 'it is survival over death ... which represents the core of man's belief
system'
5) 'If you believe that your conscious awareness may end at physical death,
you are accepting the idea that "nothing" may follow death, and you are by
definition accepting the possibility that nihilism is correct.'
6) 'I see the thrust of philosophy today as a futile effort to make nihilism
credible. There is no extension of consciousness beyond death, except in the
"collective" or socio-biological sense'
7) 'For the Essentialist, the logic of evolutionary theory is quite
compatible
with a supernatural Source.'
8) 'So long as we insist in believing that there ... is no reality apart
from
the physical world, that there is no primary cause or ultimate meaning ...
we are doomed to fulfill Nietzsche's prophecy of a culture without belief, a
life without purpose.'
I'm afraid I have to question your reasoning.
1) Transcendence (understood as 'life after death') is not the only possible
way of giving/finding meaning or purpose to life. Lots of people give/find
meaning or purpose in contributing to something they leave behind after
dying: children who are better off than they themselves, a stronger
community, visible artifacts, a healthy organization etc..
3) It is only natural to choose continuation after death to the extent that
you identify with individual characteristics that seem to require a physical
body and/or a consciousness that in our experience depends on the well-being
of that body. To the extent that you identify with a collective, it will
(usually) continue anyway after individual death. It is even possible that
the collective will be better off because of your individual death. In some
cultures old and ill people choose death voluntarily in order to relieve
their community of a burden.
4) Only in very individualistic cultures can survival over death be the core
of belief systems.
5) Consciousness is not everything, so the end of it doesn't imply that
"nothing" follows death. I experience people (and 'creation' more generally)
as essentially connected, whether I or they are (continuously) conscious of
it or not.
I don't know whether I am an essentialist (how do you define one?), but I
agree that
7) the logic of evolutionary theory is compatible what that of a common
source, of 'creation' and
8) belief (i.e. trust in fate/providence) and purposeful life requires
understanding that reality is more than 1st and 2nd level static patterns of
value.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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