Sublime

Existence only appears substantial because of our intellectual inferences, assumptions, confabulations and expectations. What is actually in front of our eyes now is incredibly elusive. The volume of our experiences—the bulk of life itself—is generated by our own internal myth-making. We conjure up substance and continuity out of sheer intangibilit

for Hegel metaphysics is possible.

There are two traditional ways of addressing this material death and the anxiety it may provoke. The first is to argue that we have an immortal soul that is separate from the decomposing matter of our bodies. Even though our bodies perish, we do not really die but ascend to a higher existence, independent of any body or endowed with an incorruptibl

The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

This has led some philosophers, such as Sam Harris, to argue that science can always resolve ethical dilemmas, because human values always hide within them some factual statements. Harris thinks all humans share a single supreme value – minimising suffering

The imagined order is inter-subjective.

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

This is why some of our noblest thinkers have felt obliged to hope for another life. Not for their own sake, not because they selfishly wanted their own lives to go on for ever, but in order to squeeze some moral sense out of the universe and even out its colossal injustices.

This world seems to be indifferent to our fate. Even worse, we lack real control over our environment. Death can strike at any time and it is, in a very real sense, the only certainty that life offers us. Heidegger called our awareness of our own mortality ‘being-towards-death’.