Thread: I'm sorry if this has been asked before but...

No, not a joke, seriously, I want your answer to the oldest question man has ever asked.

Because.
No joke.

- -Barrett

Lots of people had long-winded responses to this philosophical demeanor.

Bradybaker had responded to something like this hella days ago, just a simple reversal of the challenge to "why not"?

Some things you just have to know without thinking about.

The European Existentialists didn't already know what they were living for and tried to put together an intellectual package to give meaning to their lives, and then when they found they could come up with no truly compelling reason (people who can't prove God can hardly prove anything else that is important either) and so they nearly all committed suicide... either very directly, or slowly with alchohol and drugs.

and as intellectual as I can be at times, my reason for living leans toward the emotive and the aesthetic. Why, just this evening, I went out to tend to my Feral Cat Feeding Stations, and particular favorite of mine, Blackey, actually ran out into the rain to greet me. And when all the others saw how happy that made me, they all came out of their cover and proceeded to walk across the clearing with me toward the Feeding Stations. Well, I know cats and could only suppose that if the rain was uncomfortable for me, then it must have been driving them to distraction, and so I ran over to the tree line. when they saw how sensible I was becoming, all their tails went up in the happiest response cats can express. Well, that made me laugh. Life for a moment was fun.

Maybe the Existentialists could have used a hobby.

why not? would be the correct answer

Originally posted by Leo Volont
The European Existentialists didn't already know what they were living for and tried to put together an intellectual package to give meaning to their lives, and then when they found they could come up with no truly compelling reason (people who can't prove God can hardly prove anything else that is important either) and so they nearly all committed suicide... either very directly, or slowly with alchohol and drugs. *

Maybe the Existentialists could have used a hobby.

Was there another group of European Existentialists I'm unaware of? Am I confused? Are you confused?
Camus: Died in a Car Crash. Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau Ponty, Heidegger all died of natural causes, none of them committing suicide or succumbing to drug or alcohol dependencies. Despite your insinuation that these were philosophers of despair, those of us who have actually read these European Existentialists will know that they wrote novels, plays, philosophical essays, formed resistances, pioneered feminism before it was adopted as a movement in the United States, advocated causes for opressed indivduals in Algeria and other countries. While, generally, most of them viewed the human condition as an absurdity, this doesn't mean they considered life meaningless. In fact, they embraced it as an opportunity for the individual to create meaning in one's life.

I suggest you do some reading into this before you spout such erroneous statements.

Ah, the age old question. It can only be answered with another question.

(and yes, responding to the last post. They indeed wrote novels. Pick up some camus.

Life is an oprtunity given to each and everyone of us, an instant during wich we love , laugh, cry, fight, hate, think... it is an oportunity too precius to be wasted, we are now, but to soon the light of our existence will be replaced by the emptiness, of nothing, and THEN, we will live only in the memory of those that we have loved, and have loved us, I am in love with life, why?, becouse.

why not? would be the correct answer[/b]

Close but i belive " Because " is the correct answer

Because.
No joke.

- -Barrett[/b]

Originally posted by SwordOfGod
Why?

I liked the line of thought I got from The Matrix movies (surprise! :)

The first part dealed with the question: What?
Like in 'what is reality?'. How do we define it? This is part of the scientific endeavour and part of philosophical one. Neo found an anwer that reality is not what it seems like. I think that reality IS what it seems like but you have to know how to look :)

The second part dealed with question: Why?
Like in: 'Ok, the reality as we can define it is rather unstable but why am I here? What should I live for? What is the meaning of this all?' Neo found an answer that he is the chosen one and should save the world. My answer is not that grandiose but might aply to a larger group of people: You should find the meaning in the process of doing, not in the final act of achieving what you desire. And usually the larger group of people you make happy the happier you will be yourself.

Logically the third part should have dealt with the question of: So what? But instead it was a lousy 'take my money and kick some ass' movie with no deeper insight at all (in my opinion :). It would have made a fine line of plot if the whole would have made a stoy like in: '1. Ok, the reality is unstable,2. Ok, I know what I am doing here 3. So what I'm supposed to do next?

-DreamTrainer

You advetise those answers as ones from other forum goers, or yourself, but "because" and "why not" have already been said. "Because" is the response everyone has in their head already. "Because" is required to function, you have to push past it, you accept that it does work and that's it. "Why not" is the existentialist answer.

My answer is, "I don't know"

My rough answer would be something like this: Imagine existance, life, what-have-you as a graph over time, with any two suitably dualistic entities occupying the extremes of the Y-Axis (Good and Bad, Right and Left, whatever) as positive and negative poles. Nonexistance creates a flatliner - no movement, no anything in any direction, just a horizontal line forever, nothing good and nothing bad.

Existance, though, is just like a heartbeat on that same graph: moments of good (positive activity), and moments of bad (negative " "), and all shades in-between. The answer to "Why?" comes in the observation that the sum of those parts does not cancel itself out to equal the same that that nonexistant flat-line graph does - good and bad do not negate but complement each other, becoming more than the sum of their parts. There is more, more of anything you care to quantify, to be found in being than there is to be found in not being. A left and a right do not equal a nonaction.

This only offsets the "Why," of course, from (my) assumed "why be?" to a new question of "why have more instead of less?" ...to which I still have no answer aside from the observation that a universe that favored less of whatever as opposed to more of it would have in the first moment of its existance found it more advantageous to do away with itself, as 0 universes are more favorable than 1.

Originally Posted by SwordOfGod

Why?
[/b]

Because if not, then it would be something other than what it is, and by definition, everything is what it is.

Two poems by Spencer Powers, a writer from my state, explain it...

Nothing exists
because if it would not,
then it does not,
and it does,
so it inherently would not.

[Nothing] is not anything,
so it is not not anything.
Nothing is anything,
therefore it is everything.


I hope that clears up everything.