The dialectic of existence as the war of having to take sides

 Practically all inquiries into death, immortality, existence, being and consciousness are stultified at the outset by a presumption that they are desirable (or the reverse). The only reasonable approach is to observe what facts there are to be observed and make one’s choice on the basis of these—afterwards, not before.

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The dialectic of existence as the war of having to take sides. To sponsor affirmation of the world (like Nietzsche or Schweitzer in their very different ways) leads to championing that side, leads to suicide, which is conquest and enslavement by the opposite. Then the whole process can be worked out on the opposite side by denial and satanism (Byron, etc.) when the counterpart suicide-as-conquest-and-enslavement by the opposite takes place. The average man crowds the middle areas, but his ideals all point to taking sides: when the pressure is put on he takes sides for all his pacific arguments.

Suicide here is self-sacrifice to the acknowledged master as the necessary consequence of achieving mastery in affirmation or in negation. To be the complete master of affirmation is to sacrifice oneself wholly to negation and into its slavery, and then the suicide-death is simply a switch of the fundamental being to the opposite, with the switch from mastery to slavery …

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There are two ways of attempting to deal with the appalling difficulties of choice on the higher ethical levels (Truth/ beauty/goodness; family/country, war/peace, principles/ persons…): (1) one can attempt to justify a one-sided choice, and this is what philosophies of value and religions attempt to do through reason and faith (feeling,) respectively. But this always founders or is never safe from foundering. (2) Or the dialectic can be squarely faced in the fact that no one-sided solution of it is ever justifiable by reason or by faith. And here enters the question not of acceptance or refusal, nor of affirmation or denial, but of letting-go. The letting-go, however, is limited, in life at least (and without taking death into account) by the boundary of ability to let go.

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The fundamental existential choice (made by the individual in infancy) is the identification of I/me with a historical facticity, as this-unique-body-of-behaviour-which-I-am-becoming.

That fundamental choice, as part of its necessary facticity, must have a particular perception associated with it (my body is thus, not otherwise), a particular affectivity (it is a pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent choice, whence ‘I love life,’ ‘I am evenminded’ or ‘I hate existence’) and conative (in the sense that it is ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary’, i.e., passive and imposed).

Nanamoli Thera