Comments on: There Is But One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:15:45 +0000

Just wanted to take the opportunity to quote Jacob Bernoulli(1654-1705) who discovered the properties of self-reproduction in equiangular spirals.

“Eadem mutata resurgo”

Translated -”I shall arise the same, though changed”, something he later had engraved on his tomb-stone together with a representation of equiangular curve =)

By: Nihilizo

Nihilizo — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:54:45 +0000

@ Number one, indeed, it is not so much the question of IF life is worth living, but rather, is there anyone there to live it?

By: SpGNo

SpGNo — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:43:36 +0000

Wow. That’s maybe the greatest blog post I have ever read, and for sure the best commentary on suicide I’ve ever seen.

Among other things, anyone considering suicide or stuck in a pointless cycle should read it.

By: Mary

Mary — Sun, 03 May 2009 23:13:01 +0000

Excellent post! I’ve experienced that paradoxical renewal of meaning that you write about, and you articulated its causes beautifully. I also appreciate the reminder about not letting life slip into a slow suicide. Thanks for writing this.

By: lxz

lxz — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:26:59 +0000

Inspiring article. I like it a great deal but there’s a typo that drives me crazy every time I see it. Sadly, it appears increasingly common these days.

…given up the reigns of your own life

reigns -> reins

By: Is Suicide Painless? « The Amateur’s Guide To Life

Is Suicide Painless? « The Amateur’s Guide To Life — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:00:16 +0000

[…] a great post this morning from a blog called ‘Strange Loops’. I’m always tentative in writing […]

By: LL

LL — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:43:54 +0000

I live in New Zealand, and I’d like to stow away on a boat to start over somewhere else. But then again, Richard Bach had a thing about seagulls, so I guess he’d like it here.

By: Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem » Lone Gunman

Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem » Lone Gunman — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:39:04 +0000

[…] A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life. We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice. […]

By: Harmanjit Singh

Harmanjit Singh — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:45:53 +0000

Great post. To find significance in living, knowing one’s mortality, is to be a human being.

“We are alienated if we either experience our lives as meaningless or ourselves as worthless, or else are capable of sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about ourselves or our condition” (Allen Wood, “Karl Marx”)

And self-immolation need not be that of the body. And it may be that what I seek in pain and alienation is “my” oblivion, as a separated and forever lonely entity, without knowing it.

“Thus the search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes has come to its timely end. With the end of both ‘I’ and ‘me’, the distance or separation between both ‘I’ and ‘me’ and these sense organs – and thus the external world – disappears. To be living as the senses is to live a clear and clean awareness – apperception – a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as a thinker (a little person inside one’s head) or a ‘me’ as a feeler (a little person in one’s heart) – to have sensations happen to them, I am the sensations. The entire affective faculty vanishes … blind nature’s software package of instinctual passions is deleted. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen … not happening to an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ but just happening … moment by moment … one after another. To live life as these sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and magic. Consequently, I am living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. Being in this very air I live in, I am constantly aware of it; I breathe it in and out; I see it, I hear it, I taste it, I smell it, I touch it, all of the time. It never goes away – nor has it ever been away – it was just that ‘I’/‘me’ was standing in the way of the meaning of life being apparent.

Life is not a vale of tears.” (Richard, http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/aprecisofactualfreedom.htm )