Life is a Journey. Death is Where that Journey Ends.
Animality and Finitude #1
Philosophy in its history has had two basic ways of addressing the apparent truth of the idea that life is a journey, and death where the journey ends.
According to one way, which one sees in Socrates, there is nothing else to philosophy than the realization of this truth, and nothing else to living philosophically than living according to it.
According to another way, which one sees in Plato, philosophy is precisely the realization of a truth beyond this truth, a more enduring, immortal truth that exceeds and outlasts the truth of our mortality.
Can the two ways be reconciled? On my (admittedly idiosyncratic) view, there exists no way, at least no genuinely philosophical way, to blend them into a single, higher, master way. To be a philosopher is to live and think in the tension between the two ways of philosophizing the truth of (not merely human) mortality.
This tension is not alone in the world. It resonates with other tensions. It resonates with the tensions between acting and thinking, nature and reason, animal and human, environment and society, joy and despair, pleasure and pain, life and death. Each an irreconcilable pair, but each nonetheless inseparably connected, like a journey and the place where that journey ends.
This post is a Philosophy Drop—a bitesized philoso-morsel destined to coalesce with other drops in one of several larger philoso-pools. In this case, the drop feeds into the book-in-progress Animality and Finitude.