Statement of Fragility
The word that nihilism and annihilate share is “nihil”, Latin for “nothing”. We were born from nothing and to nothing we shall return. This may be true, but does holding this position as true bring us joy? Does it make us act with agency? With potency?
1. Humans, like all life forms are fragile. We die easily.
On Earth, we exist naturally in a specific and comparatively minuscule range of temperatures and pressures. We require a more or less constant supply of nutrients, water and oxygen in the correct quantities.
While there are remarkable exceptions and technologies that allow us to withstand situations that would otherwise readily end our lives, our soft, water-filled bodies are not well adapted to extremes. Most of us could not survive for long at high altitudes, at the polar extremes, at great depths, underwater, or in the hottest deserts.
Nor do we survive well naturally occurring phenomena such as lightning strikes, volcanic ash, diseases and radiation. Some of us are bitten by spiders or snakes, we are crushed in landslides and avalanches. We humans are both stunningly accident prone, poor judges of our body’s relationship with the physical world and wildly inventive when it comes to new ways of killing ourselves and others. Thus we are run over by cars, or we run over others. We hit our heads, trip over our own feet. We perpetuate wars, instigate famines.
History is awash with endings - its history’s constant. It is considerably more likely, when compared with the entire rest of the known universe, that life should end rather than persist. It is clear from our observations that the greater part of the universe is hostile to life. Outer space has yet to reveal to us another environment in which we, or any life, could survive. Yet while life persists within its fractious bubble of physical tolerances, it’s almost unnatural, perverse even, in its scarcity.
On our human scale however, it often appears that we are inundated, overcrowded - perhaps if only because neither the physical ranges nor the available resources allow for any reduction in density. This sensation is further exacerbated by disparity, where there are a few among us who lay claim to the majority of the resources, compressing the remainder of humanity (the vast majority) into cities, where they are exploited, often willingly, along with the resources (which have become commodified) in the effort to create vast,
exclusive reserves of functionally impotent wealth, justified by nihilism, with pollution as the primary byproduct.
The air is tainted with the dust of industry and war, that creeps by degrees into the aquifers; there’s plastic everywhere - in the Himalayas, the abyssal trench, in our food. Our food, our poor food, that no longer appears to sustain us, but brings us hunger, disease and conflict. What can we understand from this? What is revealed by it? What other facet of existence do we regard as so cheap as life itself?
2. That we would so wantonly, unthinkingly despoil this infinitesimally minute island of life belies a fallacy, a belief that life is granted, eternally available; that the resources and physical conditions which we currently enjoy are permanent, stable.
Perhaps this is a naturally occurring position. Perhaps it is a delusion shared with all living things. For are we not born as all creatures: unknowing and lacking in perception as to the boundaries and limitations of our existence? Yet humans, and likely other living things, become conscious to some degree as time passes. We grow and arguably more than any other life form, can become capable of regarding our own consciousness, enacting its demands with an unusual degree of agency. We become self-aware, agents of our conscious will.
Unlike other life however, humans are uniquely powerful; a power some identify as manifesting from our extreme hegemony over other species and each other. Yet in our machinations and preoccupations that frustrates our ability to fathom the frailty of our being, in our faith that forever there will be clean water to drink, deep fertile soil in which to grow food, unblemished air with which to breathe and a temperate, stable climate in which to build our homes and lives, this power is ultimately impotent.
For whatever reason consciousness arose in humans, it arguably possesses the potency of a gift. Yet until we can reckon with the near impossibility of our survival and guaranteed ultimate demise, our power is at best redundant, at worst, a curse. This reckoning begins with abandoning the myth of material immortality, for there is no human who drops litter, who blindly unleashes the toxic sluice gates of effluents and wastes into the wilderness, who also can also comprehend their own mortality, let alone the mortality of those that live around them, or those who will survive them.
In comparison to most other life forms, humans enjoy many years of consciousness before they die. We are likely not
unique in this, but we can say for ourselves that we at least have the capacity to mature, to become potent. And it comes to a time when a person regards their own mortality that they have stepped into that maturity, for most living things do not live long enough to comprehend their experiences, but die as children.
And it is a peculiar thing, when accepting our finite term and its finite perimeters, to realise that we are born without purpose into this life; that we must find purpose, if only to heal the pain of knowing that soon we will die. Our consciousnesses are both freeing and constrictive; in conscious agency we gain additional liberties from the usual naturally occurring constraints, yet when faced with infinite possibility, the mind can stall. Is it not here that some of us ask, what is it all for? What should I do? And what do I do about the answer, when there appears to be none?
3. Taking the position that if there is a question as to the purpose of life, one must also suppose that life can indeed have purpose. And by purposefulness I mean that which makes life worth living
It is via aspects of our agency and consciousness operating in concord that we arrive at the notion of choice and subsequently, responsibility. This is not an argument in support or refutation of free-will, but simply an observation that we appear to have choices. Choices which include personal decisions about what to do with our lives and whether or not we wish our lives to continue. And when we can so readily choose whether or not to live, what causes us to choose tolive? What are the reasons to be alive?
There are of course, infinite possible reasons and this is not the place to list them. The point is that in considering all things, including our mortal end (which even for the most robust of us is comparatively imminent) invariably brings the individual to a place of reckoning, where they ask who they are and what they’re doing here. This reality, exemplified in the individual’s accurate forecast of their own death is in fact, the permanent, stable reality of things, for we are all surrounded by death at all times: the vacuum of space. Nevertheless, being born into a situation where breathing the perfectly balanced gases of a pleasant atmosphere obfuscates the truth as vigorously and compulsorily as our breath. It is perfectly natural never to think about things you take for granted.
Of course, a great many people come to a place of comfort and follow the institutions and protocols invented by society to inure them to the agonies of reflection. We are social creatures and very capable of love and care. With this in mind, is it any wonder that we seek to protect ourselves and others with stories of immortality? Is it any wonder that we negate mortality, that we are alienated from its ways? Is it any wonder that in our immaturity, we are rendered impotent and fearful on our death beds?
Some people accept everything that is before them, but this is not usual, nor is it usual for people to die well (at least not in this land). Consciousness in its immature state cannot reconcile with mortality, but regards it as unnatural, an adversary to be defeated, evil even. Thus we see the apparent contradiction of a civilisation that has never been more informed, never enjoyed access to so many resources, never existed in such comfort, comfortably annihilate itself and the environment that sustains it.
4. The narratives that society whispers to itself in its sleep does little to bring us to a place of purpose beyond the confines of the end papers. There is a fine line between swaddling and suffocation, yet after a time who really wants either? Certainly it is has been regularly observed that dying people regret the absence of purpose in their lives. It is as though only in their final breaths do they come to the realisation that what they previously thought was purpose, that nebulous objective, was not.
Mortality, far from being a morbid subject for consideration, doubtless brings fears. But if a person can look at it, accept it, look into the void with wonder, endings can also bring urgency and inspiration. All time is short and life must not only be a state of existence involving respiration, but must be lived. Like it or not, this is a condition our consciousness holds for us. No, it is morbid to wilfully negate death, to deny its existence, to look away, to fear it and align it with evil, to forget about it. For in that condition, a life, bound in anxiety and hearsay, cannot be wholly lived.
So if we want to live and want to find purpose to warrant our life’s continuance, if this is a definition of wholeness, then we must look and listen and mature. If we wish to live in peace for as long as we last, where we can breathe clean air and drink clean water; if we wish to be free from disease, famine, pollution and war, then in regarding our own mortality do we forget to regard the end of all things? Do we not regard all mortality as real?
Responsibility exists. For regardless of how it came to be that humans were the ones to carry conscious agency,
regardless of how we came into our power, in fathoming the mortality of all things, in acknowledging the precarious, precious reality of life, we can choose stewardship over indifference. Even if this means we lead in mourning.
This I believe, is the function of consciousness: to resist the nihilist position that life does not contain or require purpose, reflection, or meaning; it resists that morbid sensibility that assumes that no one is looking when more litter is added to an already over-flowing bin; resists the attitude that would nonchalantly destroy the one thing in the universe really worth believing in. It is in resisting nihilism and its products, in oneself and others, by enacting a stewardship that necessarily includes mortality, that humans will realise the meaning in their fragile power.
It is in this act we might become potent.
