The problem with philosophy

The problem, however, with philosophy, is that it is more concerned with itself and its own survival than the problem of death. In death there is no philosophy, or philosophers, there isn't anything; there isn't even nothing. The question "why is there something, rather than nothing?," doen't even arise. It can't. Death is not. "Death is not an event in life," according to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. "We do not live to experience death." 6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Everyday the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. The world, so they say, started with bang, and so too it seems inevitable that it will end with a bang, but that is all part of the "logic of life."

The wider our point of view, the poorer our focus. The more narrow our point of view, the more unobservable our object becomes. Just as the visual field cannot examine the eye upon which itis contingent, so too life cannot contemplate death - for the one is completely incompatible with the other. Death lies beyond language because it is a limit of the world. It is wholly other. And Reason, is here the prisoner of life. It can never say anything about death. It can, as it were, only speak "around" its subject. Can we comprehend this darkness?

Most probably not; but it lurks around everthing. And it is the only thing from which no one can escape. Christ came to conquer death only to be killed himself. Some say he rose, perhaps, but that hasn't changed anything. Good and Evil are part of the logic of life. Death has no room for such ideas. It has no place for love or resurrections. It has no place for pleasure or pain. It is our universal destination, and yet, we know so little of it. Nor, apparently, do we care to. To bring it up is in bad taste. No one can bridge the gap. The leap is total and complete. There is nothing absurd about it. What is absurd is us busying ourselves with the question of meaning, of God, of immortality. Do these not seem ridiculous, each one, in the face of the not?

What is absurd is prolonging the agony through age and disease toward the inevitable end. The urge, to make one's mark. An animal mark's his terrirtory, is our need to make out mark and more absurd? Perhaps an instinct toward survival embedded somewhere in the limbic system. But why the cerebral cortex and cerebellum? Such a waste of resources, seemingly.