
Even if one had a full knowledge of human nature and its evolutionary history, and a radically intimate and complete acquaintance with one's own neurobiology and unconscious dispositions, one would still have to decide--contingently in the devising of a life--what to do next. So free will is a social and narrative necessity, not a physical truism, and biography, culture and politics are the unfolding of practical freedom and value over time. This for me is why the narrative and the existential are one and the same. What to do? How to live?
I recall reading once in some George Orwell essay that change can only happen in three ways, through violence, education, or politics. Arguably all somatic medical treatment, whether major surgery or an antidepressant, is a kind of violence done to the body, violence that may be necessary for helpful change. Psychotherapy is a kind of education inasmuch as it illuminates and broadens possibilities.
Today I finished Jim Holt's marvelous Why Does the World Exist? and I note two notable quotes:
"And if reality has no special feature, then my own presence in it cannot be explained by the hypothesis that I somehow enhance that feature, add something to it. Thus there can be no cosmic point to my existence--or rather, the only point to my existence is that I exist. Sartre was on to something like this when he said, "Existence precedes essence." And the purpose of my life? As eponymous antihero of Ivan Goncharov's great novel Oblomov is wisely told by his friend Stolz, "The purpose is to live." That is a tautology worth remembering."
And in considering whether death represents a loss even in the case of severe suffering, Holt quotes the philosopher Richard Wollheim in what seems the most compelling rational case against suicide that I have encountered:
"It is not that death deprives us of some particular pleasure, or even of pleasure. What it deprives us of is something more fundamental than pleasure: it deprives us of that thing which we gain access to when, as persisting creatures, we enter into our present mental states...It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger."
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