| Is Life Worth the Strife?  [+ favourites]
Is life worth living? A stupid question, an impudent question - because it is impossible to answer? No. Quite the contrary: because everybody knows the answer. We can be be assured that not one person who opens this thread has either the folly or the spirit to deny single inscrutable piece of wisdom... a black monolith in the recesses of all minds. Everyone, from the old to the young, from the sagacious to the silly, from the cheery to the melancholy... all of them enter a sort of primordial unity to unerringly answer: no. Of course, many of you will be very non-committal; some will treat the question as if it doesn't matter. Others will refrain from answering directly, transposing, embellishing and ultimately concealing their writings with the kind of impish skill which belies the heavy-handedness of what went before. Some of you will flee, or condemn this thread as mere nostrum of existential angst. But this all points undeniably to one thing: that you in fact do know the answer. Which is - no, life isn't worth living.
Albert Camus famously said that suicide is the only philosophical question, but he was wrong. It is the only answer. It is the answer to every question mankind has ever asked, the fateful point at which the antithetical wills of men - so often in thunderous variance - can finally intersect, and all can agree. For let it be said (even though it is already known) that life is a sham, a joke, a devilish and hopeless malady.
Every human being in history, from the noblest martyr to the meanest crook, can be reliably said to have gone to the grave with a formidable body of philosophical achievement. Every worm that feasted on human flesh was feasting on a philosopher.
The tragedy can be blamed on the intellect. Nothing is more lamentable than the fact that human beings have 'minds'. Nothing in nature is more ill-fitted to its purpose, nothing more useless and profligate than the mind. It constantly asks questions which it cannot answer, meaning that, in sum, it serves to frustrate, unhinge, and generally unsettle with puerile neuroticisms the tides of human thought. The mind is a machine without a function, a tool
without a task, a weapon without a target. And how destructive it is! Yet this lumbering, useless, mendacious thing - how seductive it is for a human being! How powerful its hold over us! One may suggest the rejoinder that I seem to be saying that we are seduced by the very faculties which seduce us. This is unfounded, however: for man is essentially an animal, and the intellect not part of his essence at all... although the intellect distorts this. The intellect despoils us, distances us from nature and our original provenance, and casts a long and perfidious shadow over civilization. Behold the untoubled ease of the cow chewing the cud: nobody can put 'ideas' into its head and transform it to a ghastly facsimile of itself, because it has no mind!
Reason is like trying to open a locked music box: it is a grave struggle for a silly jingle. But I will not keep my reason in slavish abeyance!
The most original thought most people have is that they have original thoughts. But all know this... all know the answer to life's cardinal problem. What they don't do is act on it. My spirit redounds with valour, my blood is alactric - the world echoes with my fate. I must take a knife to my throat.
You probably think I'm being very silly. I am. I'm typing and not slashing my wrists. Really, guys, what's your morbid fascination with life?
[ Edited by wittgensteins at
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