"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
"It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious."
Stephen Hawking
"Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh...
Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time...life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested.
Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."
Ernest Becker
"Voila mes philosophes." (Here are my philosophers)
The French materialist La Mettrie used to say this of his senses...He claimed to have reached this insight during a fever, when he realized that his intellect was entirely subject to his body.
Entelodont, crocodiles, sharks, and T-Rex: Voila mes philosophes.
One must eat, sleep, strive for sex and then die. Anyone with a harsh disease or illness knows the burden of the body. Anyone who has seen death come upon your loved ones and friends knows the power of the body. Anyone who has starved or suffered merciless due to the body...knows. Many people who have full stomachs, healthy bodies or a modest safe society can judge from an arm chair philosophy that life is divine but they fail to use their imagination of other realities besides their own. (See Primo Levi writings) But the body will come and ask for its debt at some time and then they will know the body is a philosophy unto itself. Death comes to us all.
The limits of the body are combined with the free imagination of the human mind. A glorious combination or the human horror? Viktor Frankl stated “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering." Could it be that suppressing reality and creating illusions might be vital to human life with its burden of consciousness?
Humans do not have to be indifferent to the pain and suffering of other living organisms and that is where humanity can use its bigger brains to heal and care for life instead of reveling in solipsistic survival and comfortable inertia. Otherwise this passive nihilism will hatch anew Marquis De Sade's ascent.
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