Ornoth

I must admit, I’ve always been kinda confused by vegetarians.

Many, if not most, vegetarians avoid meat out of compassion for other living beings. This is, of course, a laudable sentiment that I personally agree with and support. If I were a vegetarian, this would be my primary motivation.

On the other hand, vegetarianism that’s based on the sanctity of life doesn’t make much sense if you agree that plants are just as much “living beings” as animals. Is killing and eating a plant really any less violent than killing a cow or a lamb? Why? Is it because we feel more “kinship” with that cow than we do, say, a turnip?

The history of human ethical development can be viewed as a glacially slow progression of extending respect to other life forms. We began back in the caveman days, when Grog came up with the revolutionary idea that he shouldn’t cross the river and kill Kracken’s whole family, since they were kinda the same as his family.

Tens of thousands of years later, mankind is still struggling with the idea that people from the neighboring country are kinda the same as we are, even though they talk funny; that people are still people, even if they worship ridiculous pagan gods (or, heaven forbid, some blasphemous variation of our own); and that we are all one, even if our skin color isn’t.

Here’s where I give vegetarians credit: they’ve extended that idea of kinship, and the compassion that comes with it, to other mammals. You don’t eat cows and pigs and dogs and lambs because, dammit, there’s something about them that we can identify with and care about. We don’t want them to suffer and die just for our convenience. Well done, Captain Vegetable!

But that’s just one more incremental step along a long path of ethical development: one more case of us realizing that just because something is different doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of our honor, respect, and compassion.

The next steps in our ethical development are obvious: extend that same degree of compassion to birds, fish, shellfish, and insects. Giving mammals preferential treatment over other members of the animal kingdom makes about as much sense as giving Jews preferential treatment over Muslims.

Oh. Right. We’re not quite there yet, are we? Maybe someday.

Objectively, fish and insects are life forms just like you and I, and the more we respect life, the more we must care about their suffering, too. There are already people who, instead of swatting them, escort their household bugs outside, being careful not to harm them.

Assuming we finally manage to extend our compassion beyond our fellow humans and other mammals, to fish and insects, it’s only a matter of time before we finally admit that plants are living beings, too.

And here is where I must ask of my vegetarian friends: why is the life of one stink bug more precious than our annual destruction of millions upon millions of tomato plants, or corn stalks, or Christmas trees?

The precedent has already been set of humans taking action to save an individual redwood or a swath of forest from being clear-cut. That action makes no sense unless the idea has begun to take root that all life—even vegetables!—is worthy of our respect and compassion.

Of course, I’m not arguing that vegetarians should stop eating vegetables, or ethically regress by resuming eating meat. It’s an unfortunate and unavoidable fact that right now, humans must eat formerly living beings in order to survive.

That’s an interesting realization, because it establishes an ethical dilemma for us: our survival requires us to kill living beings. Since most religions say that killing is one of the worst actions one can perform, doesn’t that mean that mankind is inherently evil?

That’s an interesting contrast to what we normally hear, which is that humans have a favored position in the universe. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all assert that man was created in God’s image, and Buddhism says that a human rebirth is a rare and precious opportunity to attain enlightenment. A good example is this quote, attributed to Anagarika Darmapala at the 1892 World Parliament of Religions:

To be born as a human being is a glorious privilege. Man’s dignity consists in his capability to reason and think and to live up to the highest ideal of pure life, of calm thought, of wisdom without extraneous intervention.

But how do we reconcile this self-congratulatory view of ourselves with the gory fact that every day of our lives we must kill and eat our fellow living beings?

Now let me set the question aside and take a bit of a side track, because that idea dovetails nicely with some of my own feelings concerning the sanctity of nature, and particularly trees.

Since childhood, when my summers were spent along wooded lakes in Maine, I’ve felt a deep spiritual respect for trees. In college, there was a particular pine tree deep in the woods behind campus that was “my tree”, where I’d go to commune with nature, and more recently I have similarly rooted myself to a particular spot near the Arnold Arboretum’s “Conifer Path”.

Combining this with my previous train of thought has given me a better reason to admire trees from a spiritual standpoint. Think about it: unlike us, trees don’t need to kill anything in order to survive. In fact, trees do zero harm at all, yet they have the longest lifespans of any complex living organism on our planet.

From a Buddhist perspective, trees are the epitome of equanimity, stoically accepting life as it is, with no need to control it or change it. They are equally connected to the air, the earth, and to water.

As a result, it is no surprise that euphemisms like “the Tree of Life” fill our language, and that trees play a central and symbolic role in all major religions, be it the bodhi tree that the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath, or the Judeo-Christian images of the olive branch and Tree of Knowledge.

I seem to be in implausibly diverse company in my respect for trees’ spiritual nature:

• Willa Cather: I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
   
• George Bernard Shaw: Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
   
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait, and both without impatience. They give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
   
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
   
• Mikhail Gorbachev: To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
   
• Ronald Reagan: A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?

Trees give us a model of simplicity, acceptance, and meditative silence. If you searched the world over for the best master meditation guru alive, you could do no better than to follow the example of a tall, strong tree, standing silently while the world flows and transpires all around him.

If I was to be reincarnated after this life is over, I think, contrary to most people’s belief, that coming back as a tree might well be the wisest choice one could make.

And if you were looking for evidence of divinity in our world, I think this is where you should look. Surely the pattern of growth rings in a tree are the literal fingerprints of whatever force—personified or otherwise—created us.

As noted earlier in this journal, I've recently embarked upon a study of philosophy in an attempt to validate and possibly extend my own personal belief system. Having found little of interest outside my core philosophy, which owes a great deal to my existentialist readings in high school, I decided to proceed with a more in-depth study of the existentialists, to see how their opinions supported and supplemented my own. To that end, I recently finished reading Walter Kaufmann's "Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre", which includes the original writings of several of existentialism's most prominent thinkers, including, in addition to the ones named in the book's title, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, Camus, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Karl Jaspers.

What follows is a general discussion of the points where I felt most in agreement with the ideas that were presented, along with attributed quotes.

What is Philosophy?

One of the points which I most agreed with was Jaspers' concept of philosophy. He states that philosophy is not an obscure intellectual exercise, but that it is the natural outcome of life when lived with reflection and thought. Furthermore, he argues that it by definition a very individual thing, not an aligning of oneself with pre-existing doctrines. Kaufmann's introduction describes Jaspers' "conviction that genuine philosophizing must well up from a man's individual existence".

Jaspers:
Philosophical thought is a practical activity ... Philosophizing ... is not a profession or application of a doctrine, but the practice of being human.

What is Work?

Nietzsche had some wonderful things to say about work, and how distracting it can be.

Nietzsche:
Behind the glorification of "work" and the tireless talk of the "blessings of work" I find ... the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work -- and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late -- that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions.

Nietzsche may sound like a slacker who expects his parents (or patrons, in the case of 19th century philosophers) to support an idle lifestyle, but what he's really trying to say is that being overworked isn't conducive to philosophical reflection, and that the preoccupation with work has been used as a way to suppress individuality. And all this was written nearly 125 years ago!

What is God/Faith?

One of my own personal beliefs is that only the deluded can have any degree of certainty about the answers to life's great philosophical questions. Because "faith" is the belief in something for which there is no proof, by definition "faith" cannot be used as evidence of the existence of God. Nietzsche was particularly skeptical about the existence of God and the motives behind those who believe.

Nietzsche:
Weariness that wants to read the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Nietzsche:
'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true.

Stevie Wonder:
When you believe in things that you don't understand,
Then you suffer; superstition ain't the way.

For Nietzsche, faith in God equated to inability to face the hard facts of life and the needfulness of taking responsibility for one's life's purpose. Sartre, of course, saw the whole question of God's existence as somewhat meaningless.

Sartre:
Even if God existed that would make no difference ... we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

Sartre:
We are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.

Sartre, like Nietzsche, clearly believes that those who seek God are on an absurd, futile quest. From his refutation of diety and its pertinence, he derives a very clear conclusion.

Sartre:
The existentialist ... finds it extremely embarassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven ... Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.

Does the concept of absolute, objective ethics die in the absence of God? Not necessarily, but it does erode most of the validity of the objectivist's position. With no God, there is no governor on man's behavior, and there are no ethics save for what we create or adopt. This is the heart of existentialism's subjectivity.

What is Life?

Those who dismiss existentialism rarely get beyond those two points and their negative implications. What a dreary, scary place the existentialist must live in! However, the existentialists themselves disagree. Life has its own meaning.

Dostoevsky:
Although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life.

Kafka:
That life lends itself to many different interpretations is of its essence.

Laibach:
Life is life.

What is Man?

Okay, what do the existentialists suggest we do with our lives, since they are apparently without any cosmic meaning?

Sartre:
At bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is -- is it not? -- that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.

Ortega:
Man ... has to make his own existence at every single moment. ... Man is the entity that makes itself. ... whether he be original or a plagarist, man is the novelist of himself. I am free by compulsion, whether i wish to be or not.

Devo:
Freedom of choice
Is what you've got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

Basically, the answer they provide is that you have the freedom to decide what meaning your life is going to have. Or, rather, you are forced to decide what your life's meaning will be. What really surprises me is that people criticize existentialism as pessimistic, then are willing to turn around trade this basic, yet incredibly empowering freedom in exchange for a hope in an afterlife that has to be taken purely on blind faith. It's entirely their choice, but abdicating their freedom of choice doesn't seem like a very attractive or rational alternative to me!

From this, we understand that a man's life is almost entirely of his own making. Sartre takes great pains to highlight that this is an immense responsibility -- one that that most people never accept.

Sartre:
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism ... Man is responsible for what he is. This, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.

Sartre:
From the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does ... Man is responsible for his passion ... Man is therefore, nothing else but the sum of his actions.

In the middle there hides an interesting point: Sartre believes that a man is entirely responsible for his emotions, as well as his rational acts -- that his emotions are controllable affectations.

But the overall message is one of complete freedom to create meaning in a world that has no inherent meaning. How this is a pessimistic philosophy, I don't know.

Is Existentialism Pessimistic?

Well, that depends on what matters to you. Too many people focus on existentialism's atheism, subjectivity, and denial of an afterlife. However, existentialism provides man with the ultimate in freedom in how to live his life as he chooses, and focuses us on making the most of each moment as we experience it. Rather than a depressing, fatalistic philosophy, existentialism can be an incredibly powerful, liberating mode of thought.

Kaufmann:
Secular existentialism is a tragic world view without, however, being pessimistic.

Jaspers:
Nietzsche ... found in atheism not simply a loss but rather the greatest opportunity.

Jaspers (speaking of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche):
At the limits of life's possibilities came not any heavy seriousness, but rather a complete lightness as the expression of their knowledge.

Nietzsche, as well as Sartre in his concise and insightful "Existentialism is a Humanism", both agree: existentialism is not a philosophy of despair. While they see mankind's state as absurd and somewhat tragic, it's clear that they would have agreed with my 2/24 entry "Philosophy for Dummies" that asserted that nihilism does not need to produce distress, pessimism, or despair.

Amusingly, as I compose this, I am participating in a conversation with Inna. When I teased her about having a mid-life crisis, she asked if I were having a mid-life crisis. My philosophical reply?

Ornoth:
I'm an existentialist; life is a crisis.

By which, of course, I meant something specific. Typically, a mid-life crisis is brought about when someone realizes that they've been living on autopilot, and because their days are dwindling, they change their life to make the most out of the moment. As an existentialist, I believe that all of life should be lived in such a way: treasuring each day, living fully in the moment, and saturating yourself with experience. Death is real and unavoidable, and all of life is a form of "mid-life" crisis. Your life's span is all that you are given; that's a wonderful gift, and you should enjoy it to its fullest!

So what's the concluding statement about "Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre"? Well, there have been some insights along the way, but they're very much limited to fine-tuning of the philosophy that I've derived from my own experience of life. Still, it's a good thing to examine those values periodically, lest you forget what the grand old man said:

Socrates:
The unexamined life is not worth living.