flinn@seismo.UUCP (01/24/84)
We need a shorthand term for comments on Laura's articles, hence 'YALC.' Quoting from Laura: >They [Sartre, Camus] think that a life *is* *a* *thing* -- not a process. >Thus they are obsessed with death since it is only after this that you >can get enough of a view to say "oh yeah, that is what so-and-so really was". >... I think that this is horrible. It is one thing to be responsible for the >NOW, but must one carry all one's past misdeeds with one? I did a lot of >awful things as a child, most of which I would not do now. I am not the same >person. I find it hard to take responsibility for things that >"the-I-that-was" did -- I have enough to worry about with "the-I-that-is". >I can sit with an amused detatchment and wonder at the person that I was, >but I feel very little (perhaps none? it is hard to say) attatchment for >that person. >It is a very eerie feeling. I am sure that I am supposed to "have a past" >and "have a future" -- where else would the expressions come from? But >I do not feel that I have one. Ought I not feel more connected to my past >than anybody else' past? Right now, I can't feel it -- it all seems like >some sort of amusing game that was played... Of course life is a process, and one changes continuously: La Rochefoucauld said that no person differs from another more than a given person differs from him/herself at different times. One is not conscious of life as a process, though, because one is continually balanced on the sharp edge of now between the abysses of the past and the future. It doesn't seem to me that being 'obsessed with death' is at all the same thing as realizing that one's total happiness or fulfillment or whatever is the integral over all the time that one has existed, and that you can't judge how 'successful' a given life was in these terms until it closes. The end prospect that everyone has to look forward to is the catastrophe of annihilation, but there's no point in letting that gnaw at you. Satisfaction with the way one's life is going depends on ignoring this and doing the best you can with the materials at hand. The attitude of Socrates and his friends was more sensible in this way than the modern French philosophers, it seems to me. I think that an important part of the process of maturation is precisely in coming to terms with the past self and in realizing that there is no way to slough off onto someone else's shoulders any guilt or remorse for past "sins" (the definition of which is entirely internal). Nobody but you is responsible for the kind of person you have become, just as no one else is responsible for the direction your life is headed in the future. It would be a dull person indeed who couldn't look back with amused detachment and see ways that things could have been improved. Why would you *expect* to still experience the feelings had by the person you once were? The only real indication we have that the past was not a dream is the presence *now* of physical possessions that we acquired then...