Maverick Philosopher

Life's Fugacity

Here the point is very cleverly made:

I turned 52 yesterday. The first decade of my life took 20 years. The second decade took 15 years. The third decade took a decade. The fourth decade took five years. The past dozen years took 12 minutes. At this rate, I'll be dead in less than half an hour.

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us midstreamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places In California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to 59 I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus?  Fugit!

Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

One fake Halloween tombstone bore the inscription:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

But why not:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So work out your salvation with diligence!

These are two diametrically opposed responses to one and the same admitted fact, the brevity of life. The worldling, to give him a name, take the shortness of life as a reason to make the most of it, to "grab for all the gusto you can," in the words of a 1960's beer commercial since, in the words of the same commercial, "you only go around once in life." The idea is that since our days are few, our pleasures and experiences must be many, so that we may ‘get the most out of life.’

The seeker, however, rejects this merely quantitative solution to what strikes him as a qualitative problem. Fundamentally, the problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. Let me try to make this clear.

For the person I am calling the seeker, the problem is not that our days are few in number, a problem that could be solved by having more of them, but that each day, each hour, each minute is defective in its mode of being, so that even an endless supply of days would not solve the problem. The problem is that the world of change is a scene of unreality. Desire seeks a satisfaction it cannot find in any transient object so that piling one finite satisfaction upon another does nothing to yield true satisfaction. Among the seekers we find:

Gotama the Buddha: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (Supposedly the Tathagata’s last words.)

Plato: "nothing which is subject to change...has any truth" (Phaedo St 83).

Aurelius Augustinus: "Things that are not immutable are not at all."

Should we take the side of the worldling and view impermanence as a reason to enter into this life more appreciatively and to live it more fully, without hope for anything beyond it, or should we take the fact of impermanence as a reason to seek salvation from this world? Should we seek the deepest and richest satisfaction of our earthly desires in the brief time allotted us, or should we curtail or perhaps even renounce these desires in the hope of satisfying a higher desire? Should we party more or meditate more?

The answer depends on the answer to this question: Does impermanence entail relative unreality, a relative unreality that points to an absolute reality? Or is this impermanent world as real as it gets?

John Gay's Epitaph

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.

John Gay (1685-1732), "My Own Epitaph" from The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, 1983, p. 322.