By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
I entirely agree with Hartshorne that:
There is no such thing as "an instinct for immortality," because biological drives, or "instincts," properly so-called, have limited, not unlimited, scope.
Animals, including human animals, are not trying to live forever, but are simply trying to live out their normal life-spans. Their will to live is not a will never to die, but only a will not to die here and now, or in the near future.
Mortality is intrinsically appropriate to being a mere part, or fragment, of the whole of reality, as every animal, including any of us human animals, necessarily is.
There is a good -- specifically, esthetic -- reason for "the law of mortality," or the that of dying. Infinite variations on a finite theme could only result in intolerable monotony, which is one of the extremes of ugliness, the opposite extreme being intolerable conflict.
But there is no reason for the particular when, where, or how of dying, except the completely general reason that all of the details of reality, including the details of the lives and deaths of animals, are matters of chance, and so without specific reason.
3 May 2009
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