120 philosophical essays you must read in your life

Chapter 39

Chapter 2 Section 17 Philosophy of Life

[UK] Shelley
People are life.

Everything we experience is the universe.Life and the universe are magical.However, blindness to all things is like a thin layer of fog, covering us from seeing our own magic.We admire the fleetingness of life, but is it not itself a great miracle?

What is life?We came into the world, however, the moment we fell to the ground has long been forgotten by us, and the babyhood is just a broken fragment in our memory.We survived, but in living, we lost the understanding of life.

What arrogance it is to think that through our words we can penetrate the secrets of life!It is true that words, if used well, can make us aware of our own ignorance, but that alone is enough.

Because we cannot answer: what are we, where do we come from, and where do we want to go?Is coming into the world the beginning of existence?And is death in existence?What is birth?What is death?

Sophisticated and abstract logic erases the layer of paint painted on the surface of life, showing us a thrilling picture of life.However, in the face of such a thrilling picture, people have become accustomed to it, and only feel that it repeats itself year after year.

In my opinion, man is a kind of existence. He "sees the ancients before and sees the new ones later", and his "thoughts wander in eternity", which is insulated from the impermanence and fleeting.He can't imagine the annihilation of all things; he only exists in the "future" and "past"; no matter what his real and final destination is, there will always be a spirit in his heart who is an enemy of nothingness and death.This is the characteristic of all life, all existence.Every life and existence is both the center of the circle and the circumference at the same time; it is both the starting point of all things and the line containing all things.

However, our life is an education about fallacies.Make our free and fresh life sensibility a dead reasoning system.

We might as well recall our childhood sensibility for things.What a unique and passionate understanding we had then of the world and of ourselves!We were not so habitually drawing a line between what we saw and ourselves then as we are today.From this point of view, the child is actually in the realm of the unity of nature and man, and forgetting things and me.As people grow older, this power gradually declines and becomes a mechanical, habitual force.In this way, emotion and reason gradually degenerate into a mass of tangled thoughts and so-called impressions formed by repeated recurrence.

What is the cause of life?Or, how does life come about, and what kind of power dominates life?These questions seem to be asked by children, and perhaps only children can ask them like this.

Because adults will ignore questions that they cannot explain, ignore them, and disdain to ask.

【Together with you】

If one day, people are so numb because of world affairs that they don't even have the courage to ask themselves what they are, there is nothing unforgivable.

Because living is the highest goal in life, and they are living hard.Death is part of life, and to escape death is to escape yourself.The existence you enjoy belongs to life as well as to death.On the first day of your birth, while giving you life, it will lead you to death step by step.

(End of this chapter)