There is No Life without Death?
What would life be like without death? Would there even be
such a thing as ‘life’ without death? And why do we die? What’s the purpose of
it? Is there even a purpose of it? Is there some kind of masochistic creator
who likes to hurt us? And if so, wouldn’t making people die contradict its
notion of creating? Or maybe even the creator became confused about the notions
of life and death, and in the end decided just to go with it? Whatever the
explanation is, death remains a mysterious, yet inescapable, destination we all
share.
Let’s see: what causes us to die? Well, death might just
come about because of a flaw in our biological make-up; an unintended
by-product of the designer of humanity. It might only be due to physical decay
that our bodies will – eventually – perish. Death is just another obstacle to
overcome in our human struggle with nature, a struggle that we will inevitably
come to win. Within a couple of decades from now, people will be able to change
their cancerous limbs for platinum replicas. Plastic surgery will be outdated;
instead of getting a face-lift at the age of 55, people will get an entirely
new face. That’s how we will fight nature. We know after all from history that
humans are prepared to do anything in order for them to stay alive; even if
their opponent is Mother Nature herself.
Thoughts of death scare us. We long for certainty, for
beliefs upon which we can build the rest of our lives. However, all of our
intellectual powers fall short of explaining what will happen after we have
exhaled our final breath. But although we will never be able to know it, we
simply cannot live with the idea that we are destined to enter an unknown world
for an unknown amount of time (given that there even would be such a thing as
‘time’ in ‘the afterlife’). And there are many stories we came up with to
lighten our sense of despair about death. The issue of death is the prime
reason so many religions have come into existence. After all, the idea of a
cozy afterlife doesn’t really seem something to worry about, right? But even
non-religious people have tried to come up with ‘reasonable’ positions within
this debate. Atheists proclaim that no deity exists, which is just claiming the
opposite of what religious people do. And even agnostics, although their
position might seem more ‘humble’ than the atheists’, find themselves to be
justified in making a judgement about the afterlife by saying that ‘we cannot
decide whether or not a deity exists’; thereby assuming that, although none of
the others are capable of doing so, they can close this debate in a reasonable
manner.
Yeah right….Well, let’s look at the counterpart of death:
life. Because what would life be like without death? The obvious answer would
be: there would be nothing left to call ‘life’, since life can only exist in conjunction
with death. But let’s approach this issue from another angle; an experiential
angle. Given that we would be immortal, which might be something different than
being either dead or alive, how would we then come to value our ‘lives’? Would
we still be able to appreciate the beauty of things? Would we even be capable
of experiencing emotions in any sense? After all: how happy or sad would we
feel if we would come to experience an event that we had experienced an
infinite number of times already? Wouldn’t that downgrade the relative value of
each moment of – let’s say – sadness? How sad would it for example be to
experience your son dying, given that you are destined to experience countless
instances of this ‘drama’ again? Or how joyful would it be to experience your
son attending his first day of school, given that you’ve experienced this a
thousand times already?
There is no life without death; and that not only goes for
life in the biological sense of the word, but just as much in the emotional or
experiential sense. The notion of value would be non-existent if we wouldn’t
face death. Hence we can say that death is a beautiful invention of life. So
let’s be grateful for its existence.
But what do you think?
Comments
Post a Comment