Why the Human Soul is Immortal (and Animals are Not)

Why does the human soul persist after death whereas the souls of animals do not? In order to answer these questions clearly, we must first define what a soul is and then explore the difference between human and animal souls. To form the basis for our inquiry, we will first prove that all living things have immaterial souls that are distinct from their material bodies and that there are different kinds of souls for the different kinds of living things. Once this basis has been sufficiently laid out, we will focus specifically on whether it is possible for each kind of soul to continue to exist after death. Then of course we will determine whether it is possible for the soul not to exist after death, and by this come to our conclusion that the human soul does indeed persist after bodily death, whereas the souls of animals are destroyed.

We begin with our first question, “what is a soul?” We say that a thing has a soul insofar as it is alive. Life is manifested primarily as nutrition and growth by which something is moved by an intrinsic principle. This power is proper to all living things and is the fullest extent of life in what are called nutritive or vegetative souls (such as plants). In animals, life is also manifested in sensation and directive movement, which is why their souls are called sensitive souls. These two demarcations, vegetative and sensible, are enough to identify three ways in which the soul can be understood in relation to a living thing; viz. as form, as mover (or intrinsic efficient cause), and as end (or final cause).

Aristotle identifies the soul as the form of a living body, which is to say that the soul is what makes a living body what it is. This is not merely a definition of life, that a soul is merely what it means to be alive. Rather, the soul subsists as the actuality of a living body.¹ This means that what is potentially alive is made actually alive by its soul. This also accounts for the integrity of individual living things, as the form is what gives the material elements of a thing the status of parts of a whole.² With regard to motion, Aristotle identifies desire as the primary principle of motion and attributes this to sensible souls.³ There is also motion in the sense of nutrition and growth in vegetative souls and, for our present purpose, it is enough to mention that vegetative souls, while possessing neither a desire prompted by the senses nor the deliberation of reason, they are still inclined to motion with respect to nutrition and growth. Thus all living things are moved internally by a function or part of their souls. With regard to the end, Aristotle identifies the primary end of a living thing as the soul itself.⁴ This is simply to say that the goal of all living things is to live. Because such things are body-soul composites, they are bound to corruption and death. Hence in order to attain the end of life (no pun intended) they are generative, producing things like themselves in species, thereby continuing life specifically, though individually it dies. This necessitates a body in order for subsistence and generation to take place, albeit the body is in this regard a means to the end.⁵

By acknowledging these three roles, it might seem that the soul is some emergent property or function of material arising out of a material cause. We will consider four arguments which support this. Firstly, if the soul is the form of the body, then the soul only exists insofar as it informs the body. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that the soul is something dependent on the body.⁶ Secondly, if souls are identified according to their activity (as a vegetative soul vegetates and a sensible soul senses) then we ought to consider them precisely to be activities and nothing more. For what we observe in living things are not souls as such, but vegetation and sensation, by which we infer that there is something other than what we observe which performs those activities. But this is an unnecessary abstraction, as we perceive nothing other than activity in a material body.⁷ Thirdly, if the soul is the principle of movement in material things, then it interacts with material. But what is immaterial is impassible and cannot interact with what is material. Therefore the soul must not be immaterial but something material. Finally, the end of a living thing is to preserve its life. But self-preservation is achieved in and through the preservation of the body. Therefore, life-as-end is not distinct from the body but is merely the integrity of the body and its functions.

Against the first argument, we should note that if we regard the form as dependent on matter as a kind of supervening quality, then we would subvert the order of substance and accidents. What is accidental to a thing is secondary to what the thing primarily is, which is its substance. When the soul is called the form of the body, it is precisely meant as the substantial form. Even though matter is a necessary part of a natural living thing, the matter is not enough to identify that thing as what it is, as we see that a plant or animal can grow and diminish over time while maintaining its individuality. But to say that a living thing's soul exists only insofar as it has matter is to put accidents prior to substance or else make matter the substantial form of the body, which is absurd. Hence, if we wish to concede that there are individual living things, then the primacy of the soul is a necessary conclusion from what is perceived.⁸

To the second argument, we can build on our first reply. We ascertain the form of a thing when we identify what it is specifically (i.e. according to a species), for matter is informed according to its species by its form. This is not merely a logical device, for to refer to a substantial form is to say that there is some active principle in that living thing which unifies the parts into a whole. Now when we observe some activity in a certain thing, we can attribute that activity in two ways; to the part in which the activity is manifested, and to the whole to which the part belongs. E.g. when a worm is prodded, we may say that there is a reaction in certain material parts of that worm, and that what we observe is the action of material apparata in response to some material stimulus. This may be true with respect to chemistry, but it is ultimately unintelligible without respect to the thing acting, viz. the worm. If we cannot account for the substantial form of the worm, then we cannot say that the worm moves, but only that the parts of the worm move. But this is an unnecessary reduction, whereas it is reasonable to attribute the movement observed within a thing to the thing itself.

To the third argument, it would indeed seem that immaterial things cannot interact with material for two reasons; viz. that what is material cannot harm or hinder what is immaterial (e.g. we cannot tie down an angel or transplant a soul) and that there is no known mechanism which would explain how such an interaction could take place. But we should not form too simple a concept of immaterial things. Some tend to think of interaction in terms of bodies responding to touch, like two rocks hitting together. But no interaction at all can be attributed to purely material causes. The rocks that one knocks together are being moved ultimately by something that does the moving. So the answer to the question, how does the immaterial interact with the material, is found in the question, “what is interaction?” Strictly speaking, “pure matter” does not act. To hold this would ultimately be to conflate material cause and efficient cause and to disregard the act-potency distinction altogether. Therefore we must concede that there is something immaterial in a living thing which is the principle of its action.

In response to the fourth argument, it should suffice to say that, having proved the existence of the soul as the substantial form of a living thing, the body is the matter which is informed by the soul, and through such the soul acts. Thus the integrity of the body is due to the soul's act, which works in and through the body as the means to preserve its proper place as form. Because preservation of life is attained through the body, it does not follow that the life of the body is the body itself.

It should now be clear what the soul is; the substantial form of a living being, as well as its active principle, accounting for its growth and sensation, with the end of subsisting itself and in generating life according to its same species. This account of the soul suffices for all animals except man, whose soul is rational in addition to the aforementioned qualities. As mentioned above, the soul (as form) informs matter to participate in a given species. According to Aristotle, a species is nothing other than some member of a genus which is distinguished by means of some difference.⁹ The essence of man is the composite of his form and (indeterminate) matter and is expressed by its definition.¹⁰ This means that the definition of man is precisely a description of his differentiation as a species within his genus. Hence we define man as “rational animal,” in the genus “animal” and differentiated from other animals by his rational intellect. This leaves us with three kinds of souls altogether; vegetative, sensible, and man's, which is called the rational soul.

As we have said, the difference between a man's soul and an animal's soul is in the intellect. So if there is a difference between sensible and rational souls in their ability to survive death, then it must be on account of the intellect. But whether the sensible soul can survive death is still to be determined. In order to understand how the material destruction of a thing can effect its substantial form, it is helpful to understand that there is a kind of hierarchy of forms, owing to their relation to the matter in which they act, as St. Thomas says:

[I]t must be considered that a gradation of forms in the order of operation corresponds to the gradation of forms in the order of existence, for an operation is an act of an agent in act. Therefore the greater perfection a form possesses with respect to conferring the act of existing, so much the greater is its power of operating. Hence more perfect forms have a greater number of operations and more diverse ones than less perfect forms (DA 9 resp.).¹¹

Thus we have varying levels of forms corresponding to different levels of perfection; material forms (such as the form of bronze), the forms of living things, the forms of sensible animals, and the rational form found in human beings.¹² So we should note that an animal has perfections according to their material being, their being alive, and their being an animal, and a man specifically has one more perfection, that of being rational.

That a being has several formal perfections does not necessitate its having several souls. As explained above, the soul is a substantial form. There can only be one substantial form of any given thing, as the substantial form is precisely what accounts for its being a substance. And a substance is something which is adjoined by accidents, the latter existing in a thing by virtue of the former (we can see an analogous relation between a predicate and its subject). But a (primary) substance cannot be predicated of another substance. So if an individual were to have many souls, he would necessarily be a conglomeration of many substances and hence would not be an individual at all, which is absurd.¹³

It should now be clear that there is a “gradation of forms in the order of operation” in living things, not on account of an accumulation of various forms, but on account of a gradation of power according to each form. For example, the sensible soul is superior to material forms, for the sensible soul not only informs matter but grows and perceives as well. And the rational soul is superior to the sensible, because the rational is able to conceive of immaterial things in the intellect, and this in addition to the powers proper to the sensible soul.

So, having given a precise account of sensible and rational souls as well as their differences, we can now explain why sensible souls cannot survive death. St. Thomas explains this in the following:

[T]hings composed of matter and form are corrupted by losing the form that gives them their act of existing. Moreover a form itself cannot be corrupted in itself (per se), but is corrupted accidentally as a result of the disintegration of the composite, inasmuch as the composite, which exists in virtue of its form, ceases to exist as a composite. This indeed, is the case if the form is one that does not have an act of existing in itself, but is merely that by which a composite exists.¹⁴

Thomas here distinguishes between a form which is the act of existing in a composite (form and matter) and a form which is its own act of existing. We can see how this plays into the question of death by resuscitating our first and fourth objections from above and adding some qualifications. If a certain soul exists only as that which informs some matter, then the soul only exists insofar as it informs the body. Therefore it is necessary that the soul is something dependent on the body, not as an emergent property but in regards to its subsistence. Such a soul subsists in composition with its matter by preserving the integrity of the composite in the matter through which it operates. Thus the disintegration of the composite in death entails the dissolution of that soul which formed the composite. Simply put, the soul of a dog informs some matter as a dog's matter. Everything the dog's soul does is done through in its matter. If you disintegrate the dog then its soul ceases to exist because there is nothing left for there to be a dog.

As noted above, the human soul differs from other animals in his intellect. Man exists as an animal by means of his body, but rationally by means of his intellect. Thomas explains:

Now if there is a form having an act of existing in itself, then that form must be incorruptible. For a thing having an act of existing (esse) does not cease to exist unless its form is separated from it. Hence if the thing having an act of existing is itself a form, it is impossible for its act of existing to be separated from it. Now it is evident that the principle by which a man understands is a form having its act of existing in itself and is not merely that by which something exists. For, as the Philosopher proves in the De anima [III, 4, 429b 3], intellection is not an act executed by any bodily organ.¹⁵

While man's soul shares with other animals the operations proper to their bodies, the operation of his soul in the intellect is distinct from his body. Though man acquires knowledge beginning with the perception of material things by means of his body, all three causes present in his soul (formal, efficient, and final) act in the intellect without the incorporation of matter. His intellect does not exist as any material thing. His act of intellection moves by an intrinsic principle, without material cooperation. And the end of his intellect is not merely the preservation of life, but the attainment of truth, which is ultimately not attained in nor attributable to his matter. Thus we can see that the rational soul does not exist by virtue of its composition with matter, but exists in its own right. Therefore when man's body dies, his soul must survive.¹⁶

1 Aristotle, De Anima in Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, eds. Reeve and Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 278.

2 ibid.

3 Aristotle, De Anima, 285.

4 Op. cit. 281.

5 Op. cit. 282.

6 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputate De Anima, trans. John Patrick Rowan (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1949), A 14, Obj. 1

7 Op. cit. A 12, Obj. 2

8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, ed. Joseph Kenny (NY: Hanover House, 1957), II.xxvi.3

9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999), 998b (pg. 43).

10 Thomas Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968), IV.iii (pg. 36).

11 Aquinas, De Anima, 9 resp.

12 ibid.

13 Aquinas, De Anima, 11 resp..

14 Op. cit. 14 resp.

15 ibid.

16 ibid.

Equality Is Real

Human beings come in all types:  Some are smarter than others, some are stronger than others, some are more attractive, some have talents that others do not, some are more massive than others, some darker-skinned, and some are so mentally and physically handicapped that they are not able to take care of themselves.  All human beings (I'll use the classic 'men' for now on) start their lives naked and helpless, they rely almost completely on their parents for almost a quarter of their lives, struggle in the world for about half of their lives, and finally end up frail and helpless again.  But because all men possess different traits from birth and are given different advantages or disadvantages throughout life, most men cannot relate to each other in many things.

By the time we reach adulthood, it is obvious to us that we cannot always "get along," probably because men cannot relate to each other and the less we can relate, the less we tend to get along.  Today there is a fierce moral imperative sweeping the world which demands that all men be treated equally.  To anyone not indoctrinated from birth with this idea, it is not very obvious that all people should be treated equally.  After all, if nobody is equal, why should they be treated as equal?  To say "all men should be treated as equal" is about as easy as saying "all cows should be treated as equal."  We eat some cows, milk some, put ribbons on some, and wear some on our backs.  If a meat cow is born a runt, he will likely be killed off.  If a milk cow is infertile, she will probably be killed off.  Going further with the comparison, even the color of a cow's skin will determine what it is good for.

But people should not be treated according to what they are good for.  They should be treated as equal, even though they do not seem equal at all.  Any argument about mutual self-interest or social contracts or the golden rule as being all-important for a stable society fall short before most of human history:  Many societies more stable than our own have used caste systems or slavery.  Social conventions do not hide plain facts:  If people are not equal, we should not pretend they are equal.  But it is a plain fact that all men are equal; not physically, but in essence.

Whatever it is that makes someone a human being, it is not smarts or brains or looks or property.  If there is something that makes someone a human being, then we all have it, period.  This thing is not at all physical, which is why one cannot have more or less of it:  One is either human or not human.  This "thing" we all have is called a "soul."  In fact, it is more accurate to say that it is what we are, or specifically, a 'soul' is 'what makes me human'.  Of course, one could not take a cow's body, insert a human soul, and voila! have a human.  Even though a soul is a defining factor of a human being, our biology is still very much a part of who we are:  We are, by virtue of our biology, part of the same "human family" and are related to each other in that sense.  My parents are in this sense a part of me and their parents in them, and so on.  My identity as a human being relies partly on being related to all other humans, so I cannot truly say that I am just a soul trapped in this body.  I am my body and my soul.  My body and soul are one, and that one thing is me.

If this soul stuff sounds too weird or ethereal to make any sense, consider how nonsensical "humanity" and "equality" become when you leave the soul out of the picture.  If it is enough to be related to other men to be called "human," then we run into problems when considering things like genetic disease or evolution or -- God forbid -- if a man is grown in a test-tube or has more than two parents or has DNA that does not come from another human.  We leave room for eugenics or ideas of master-races if some genetic groups of men can be shown to be "more evolved" or can trace their lineage through more "desirable" families in history or to origins which might suggest that their ancestors were of a more intelligent progenitor species (in which case polygenism could be shown to be very problematic indeed).  Consider simply the fact that some families are smarter than others, that most white people cannot get sickle-cell anemia, or that it is much less of a nuisance to have a penis than to have a vagina.  It is not enough to be "one of the family" to be considered equal to all other members of that family.  Anyone who grew up with his family can attest to that.

Think about the traditional theme of the Totentanz, the "Dance of Death," in which members from all levels society are depicted as being forced by Death to partake in a grim daisy-chain onward into the grave.  It was understood, even in cultures well-accustomed to a tradition of hierarchy, that all men were equal when the worldly trappings of status were stripped away.  Peasant beside merchant, king beside bishop, queen beside pauper, pope beside knight; all were brought to the same end.  To see the opposite side of this is the key to seeing the source and justification of equality:  To say that this transient body has a soul is to say that it is alive.  Each man's life is equal to the other, because being alive -- i.e. a living human being -- is the same as being alive, regardless of any external embellishment.  And this is important, because if we do not see this, we have no reason to be equal.

Tragedy

Tragedy is not mere suffering, sadness, melancholia, depression, misfortune, grief, pain, or loss.  Suffering is an evil; it is not beautiful.  No evil is beautiful.  Pain, sickness, death, loss, misfortune, strife, betrayal, and grief are all evil. They are, in themselves, ugly.

Tragedy involves all of these things, but tragedy is beautiful.

Tragedy is beautiful because love is beautiful.

Tragedy and love are mutually inclusive.

There is no tragedy without love.  There is no love without tragedy.

Tragedy is the beauty which subsists in the presence of ugliness. It is the good which is present amidst great evil.  It is the truth which cannot be crowded out by lies.  No state of events can properly be called a “tragedy” unless its present and defining love is true enough to outlive its opposing evil.

Evil is synonymous with a lack of beauty, a lack of goodness, and a lack of truth.  The evil we experience in tragedy only reveals – exaggerates – the kernel of truth, beauty, and goodness intrinsic to love.  The evil characteristic of tragedy is a darkness which serves to amplify our experience of a light too subtle to notice under mundane circumstances.

Every relationship we have with what is beautiful and good is haunted by the mortality of the object’s beauty.  Whatever is beautiful and good in our experience can be crushed.  It can be turned into something ugly.  The source of the tragedy in this case is the relationship of the lover to what is loved.  We mourn, to some degree, the loss of that beautiful thing.  The thing, once passed, is no longer there, but our love for it, our desire to have it remain for beauty’s sake, persists. We experience the absence of it.  Our love outlives the object of our love.

How much greater the tragedy when the relationship is not between lover and beloved thing but between human lovers. 

There is not only loss but the looming inevitably of loss and being lost.  Death is certain.  Love however is not enslaved to death.

As soon as our empathy arises for something overwhelmed by evil, it is because we have already begun to love it.  “What a shame” we say in our hearts.  We, to some degree, desire that thing all but too late.

True tragedy, however, is not sympathy.  We ourselves experience the evil first-hand when we experience tragedy.  There is a difference between feeling sympathy for another’s loss and feeling grief at having lost; between feeling pity for a suffering victim and feeling remorse at having made a victim.  When we experience tragedy, we are not mere bystanders.  In tragedy, one involves himself in evil by being a lover.

Any love knows that tragedy is imminent, but love hopes. It does not merely “move on.”  When we lose someone, we do not forget for our own sake. We place our trust in the immortality of love because we ourselves experience a small taste of that immortality.

Tragedy is the most exquisite form of beauty.  It takes a refined taste to appreciate and is the deepest and most glorious beauty we can experience in this life.  But it is not possible to experience tragedy unless one wills to suffer.

Why Easter is So Great

What makes a superhero great?  There are super powers, strong character traits, and origin stories for most superheroes, but these are not really what determine how great a superhero is.  Super-villains have super powers, strong character traits, and origin stories as well, but they are villains.  In fact, the difference between hero and villain is usually quite dualistic in most stories as it seems to matter only whose side one is on.  The question, however, is about greatness.  Super-villains could be great, but they are never called that (unless “great” is used as another word for “cool”), and there is one reason for this:  They never win.  Only superheroes win and only superheroes are great.  Each superhero is roughly as great as his deeds and the enemy he is able to overcome.  Beowulf is a great hero because he slew two fiends and a dragon.  James Bond is a great hero because he outwitted several evil masterminds and saved the world (i.e. the world‘s status quo).  Superman is a great hero because he defeated incredibly powerful enemies and saved the world from annihilation.  Among these examples, considering their stories alone, Superman is clearly the greatest.  If Superman, with all his powers, was never able to defeat any of his enemies, he would not be so great at all.

Beowulf vs Grendel

Iron Man vs Dr. Doom
(Super-battles have gotten flashier, it seems, but the struggle remains the same)

Let us consider a real live person; Jesus Christ, the God-man.  Being the Word of God, He created the universe.  This is indeed a mighty feat, but creation involved no enemy and no resistance.  As the Word-made-flesh, resistance began before He was even born.  From Herod’s preemptive threat of infanticide to the everyday work of carpentry, Jesus met problem after problem.  Yet everything the world saw Him do was no different from what men did before him.  His miracles were certainly incredible and He amassed an impressive following, but then one very problematic thing happened.  He died.  How could the Son of God die?  Why would He die?

There are two ways of understanding the fall of man and his salvation.  The first way is that, when the very first man committed the first sin, he offended God who is supremely good.  This offense incurred a supreme penalty.  There was no way any man could ever make up for what he had done.  The penalty of sin is death and we went on dying, always paying for our sin without actually paying it off.  When God himself became a man, he was sinless and so did not have to pay the penalty.  He paid it anyway, and died.  It was then that our debt was finally paid and we were freed.

The second way of understanding is that, when the first man committed the first sin, he gave himself up to the power of Satan.  We rejected God and made the Devil our master, and he is a cruel master indeed.  Man was not created to die, but death and decay are unavoidable when the creature is separated from his Creator.  God became a man so that he would be able to die.  He gave Himself up as a ransom for us.  When God the Creator suffered death, the power of death was broken.

Yet Jesus Christ’s death by itself was not enough to change our fate and reverse our corruption.  The story of man is pathetic:  Every man lives a brief life and then dies.  There is nothing he can do about it:  When death comes, his time is done.  If God had come down to earth as a man, lived a short life, and just died, then our story would be even more pathetic.  But even though He is a man, He is also God, and being the Eternal Creator, death did not last for Him.  On the third day, when the whole world had never been more dismal, Christ rose as a man more glorious than man had ever been.  Death was changed and life was given a new meaning.  Jesus Christ changed us:  Death does not mean the end anymore.  We will live on forever, body and soul.

Christ’s enemy was death itself.  His problem was man’s slavery.  No man could have imagined how death might be overcome, let alone think it even possible.  The answer for Jews was to work around death; to mark one’s grave, to be remembered, and to have plenty of children to carry on the name.  But God is great.  He destroyed death.  Life was an absurdity under the threat of death but He turned the threat of death into an absurdity.  The greatness of Jesus Christ surpasses even human imagination.  A greater hero cannot be thought.

Jesus Christ trampling Death and lifting Adam and Eve from their prison

Belief in the Resurrection implies other beliefs as well:

·         Jesus was completely human; else He would not really have died or risen. 

·         Jesus was completely God; else He could not have risen (not even angels can raise the dead) and if Jesus was merely human and God raised Him, then His resurrection would not have been any more special than Lazarus’.

·         We deserve to die.

·         Death is bad; else Christ’s victory over it would not have been that great.

·         Death is not that bad anymore because it will not last forever.

·         Our bodies are good; else God would not have cared about saving them.

·         The things our bodies are designed to do (like eating, drinking, and dancing) are good.

·         If there is any such thing as good news, Easter is good news, and everyone should hear it.

Basic Weak Atheistic Existential Philosophies

Self-Interest as the Solution to Christianity; an Elliptical Critique

Here I wish to shed some light on a rather common mentality in our time: Self-interest. The self-interested man is one who continues the plight of the animal and forges his will by means of superior intellect to satiate his primal instinct to survive.  He is the Übermensch, the artist, the man who escapes the snares of “mediocrity”, the man freed from master-slave morality, who overthrows the shackles of taboo, who undermines the machinations of Attila and the Witchdoctor, who has buried the fabricated notion of summum bonum and has set himself up as his own god.  He recognizes power for what it is and wields his own.  Scoffing at the funerary culture of Christianity, still grieving its deceased deity, he is free.  All things proceeding from his own will, he is his own prime mover. All things directed by his own desire, he is his own form of good.  All potentiality flees before him as he creates himself through his own act.  He is, to himself, eternal.  He was there at the beginning and will be there at the end.  The world without him is meaningless because the world only exists to him insofar as he exists. He is not a microcosm within the universe:  Everything is as it is to himself:  He is the cosmos.  He lives with one notion ever reverberating through his mind, “I am who I am.”  He claims he is comfortable with this and this is what makes him most ridiculous.

Among all the truths he conjures and inculcates into his infallible worldview, one haunts him like the devil: “I will die.”  It is an ugly fact of which even the lowest animal is somewhat aware.  The primal instinct is to escape death and, for intelligent man, this instinct exudes forth from his brain as an obsession.  The Over-man is still trodden under by death and this is the humor which mingles with Nietzsche’s notion of the “gay science.”  For the egoist, the attempt to apply meaning to life is absurd.  All is futile.  All is vain.  Whatever cause, whatever impetus man finds to occupy himself dies with himself.  Mediocrity is overcome in pursuit of immortality but immortality is merely a sham and the greatest allegation against mankind’s inexorable demise.  We are, each one of us, doomed to die.

What is immortality?  The historically minded person who thinks that immortality subsists in posthumous fame or the continuation of his legacy or geniture need only ask himself if this would give satisfaction to his own will to survive.  It does not.  Alas, the greatest humor of our existence is that mortal man is too smart for his own good.  He transcends himself merely by thinking of the world without him which inevitably will be the case.  For quite some time, the world existed without him and will continue to exist after he is gone.  Mind games aside, he cannot cope with this.  The individual cannot squeeze his mind into the tiny frame of subjectivity and call himself content with his own “eternity”.  He knows that his end is upon him even now: Even now we are wasting away:  Even now our bodies succumb to decay.  Many see their impending death take hold of them slowly, torturously, and so unbearably that they hasten it.  Man becomes so oppressed by his own mortality that he often fails to see the value of life at all.  Old and feeble, mind slipping this way and that, friends and family already gone, he puts a weapon to his head or perhaps takes the rest of his medication all at once.  This, surely, is mediocrity.  Is it better to live on in the face of irresistible failure or to go against one’s primal instinct?  Either way, we are finished.  How depressing life is.  Man craves to exist but sees his very existence slipping like sand out of his mighty hands.

It is apparent that our attitudes are led in any of three directions.  Many choose to believe that “this” life is not our only life:  Immortality is the most common precept among religions and one need not wonder why.  It seems that immortality is somehow inherent to our thinking, as if primal man merely assumed that he would keep living on in some way after death.  The thought of life after death is an inclination so natural to man that we accept it without reserve from early childhood.  We cannot fully grasp the thought of non-existence and so it is no offense to the intellect to believe that we cannot entirely cease to exist.  We are hard pressed to explain how, but it makes sense to us.  It is a mysterious notion, but an easy notion because it is so satisfying.

Many may attest to their belief in the hereafter but nonetheless inadvertently fall into another attitude:  Unsatisfied by the shadowy uncertainty of religion, their craving for immortality turns to distraction. Ravenous consumers, rabid hedonists, and raging addicts of all kinds fill every waking moment with pleasure, noise, and work.  It is most likely the most common attitude of our time.   Look around and bask in wanton distraction.  Death is the last thing we wish to think about and, even when death comes into our home and makes her presence felt in our family, we hide her behind rituals, eulogies, flowers, decoration, formaldehyde, and a lot of makeup.  When one cannot see around death into the afterlife, he closes his eyes and runs from it.

Perhaps to be ever on the run is a pitiful way to go about life but, all existential dilemmas considered, it is a valid alternative to a third and even more pitiful attitude; to look death in the face and accept it.  This is real mediocrity.  This is submission to slavery.  This is direct tyranny without law or arbiter.  The will to survive courses through the marrow of our bones but it is not enough.  Someday, we will not be.  It is our greatest imperative to exist; we must exist, but we are not in control of this.  We can negate ourselves, but we cannot keep ourselves alive.  We have a mind for eternity, but our bodies fail us.  We are each one of us a failure, but to accept this failure and die with it is worse.

Self-interest is supreme stupidity.  To see one’s own failure amounts only to wisdom; to recognize what it is to be human; to be contingent.  But the self-interested man, though he is bound to accept his ultimate failure, refuses to believe. He takes wisdom only part-way and dies with it, too proud to give credence to success.  He cannot, because to admit the possibility of salvation is to admit his own impotency; that his primal instinct can only be sated by someone other than himself.  This is mediocrity.