CONFRONTING TRANSIENCE

In the preceding chapters, I have attempted to justify the belief that, while human beings are not supernatural entities, neither are they simply parts of nature. Unfortunately, that is only half the story. Our privileged mode of being is hedged about with terms and conditions: personhood is contingent on the continuing vitality of our bodies. Those bodies share the unwilled transience of all things in a restless universe. “I am” depends on “It is”: sooner or later the relevant “it” disintegrates and the “I” is swallowed up in the wider “it” of the material world; the little “who” is lost in the boundless “what”. Worse, since we are highly complex entities, and hence thermodynamic freaks, we are more transient than most of the material world that surrounds us. Pebbles, rivers, trees outlast us. Irrespective of whether or not mankind can bear too much reality, reality of a sort will sooner or later kick down the door, set fire to all our possessions, raze our property, and leave us naked to and beyond the bone, inert in the indifferent open. While we may in some sense be the makers of the world in which we live our lives, the natural realm outside of the thatosphere has us in its ultimate grip.

Thus, death the leveller, eloquently expressed by Bohuslav Brouk the Czech poet, biologist and philosopher: “The body is the last argument of those who have been unjustly neglected and ignored: it demonstrates beyond debate the groundlessness of all social distinctions in comparison to the might of nature”. And the Bible observes that notwithstanding man’s special relationship with God: “For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yes, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity”. The “justice” of transience goes beyond human affairs.