Life Choice

1. After the fall of Christian religion, the idea of life, in the western world, and then in the whole world, has vastly changed. From a vision in which life was split between a life on Earth and a life after death – death was the old passage of the Acheron between these two “lives” – remained a life with no opposition, without other.

The progress of exact sciences in the dominant perception introduces a physical definition of life which, as time goes by, sounds like this: life is a homeostatic organisation of matter. The biologic priority in the conception of life is still validated by common sense today. While life is just as commonly perceived as the lively and variable content of what happens between joy and adversity, materialism has managed to impose the precedence of the material triviality of life on the common thought. In this fatal reduction, life does not oscillate between an explosion of energy and a dreadful weariness, between the brilliance of the possible and the icy sharpness of reality, between the source that does not leave the body and the fluid that can unite us, and disunite us, all, but instead between birth and death. Life is thus, in its first sense, the dull generality of the individual.

From the end of the 19th century, life began to appear as an essential purpose of what must be called neo-philosophy. While humanity proliferates, while an individual life becomes distinct from the life of mankind, while corrupt life appears in the culture as spleen or boredom, theory pretends to life as its centre of gravity. The two great massacres called world wars have amplified this consideration for life, which became a kind of inestimable good, at once reality and aim of the human, original criterion for the good. From Dilthey to Bergson, a panegyric of life is born, in which life is posited as a necessary precondition for thought, or as the impulse that eventually drives the human. Meanwhile, perhaps as a critique or a mistrust of the collectivist or simply abstract ideals, for the Dadaists, the affirmation of life also becomes one of the declared priorities.

2. This refocusing of the essence of the dominant thought on the concept of life has led to many modifications of the dominant views. First, life is something individual, that does not belong to a god, or to the community of its servants, but to the one who bears the body that lives and dies in a relatively short time, and in a relatively limited space. Collective property of life is redistributed in as many parts and as many particular owners as there seem to be when one divides life, according to its physical definition. The ideology of life, since the arguments and the reconciliations of vitalism and mecanism, is a tribute to the materialist sciences, and remains strongly related to individualism.

The materialist definition of life, at the same time, leads to erasing the difference between the human and the animal, and even the vegetal. If life becomes the supreme good, the supreme good is no longer specifically human, but foremost animal, vegetal. Thus, for the descendants of Darwin, in the religious sacralization of life, spirit, once adored by the theists, is replaced by nature, made into a dogma by the materialists. The apparition of the living itself, as if it could be anything else than an idea, a notion, an input, becomes a sort of stage in the continuous positive evolution, at the centre of which lies the human, at the centre of which lies the individual, at the centre of which lies the deepest gratitude for this wonderful and unattainable evolution.

From the second half of the 20th century, pleasure becomes the principle of life. As a subjectivity, which at least is harder to attribute to animals than to humans, and even harder to attribute to plants than to animals, has been added to the great narrative of the species and to the individual sanctity of each plant, however founding they were of this now meaningless life. Pain, which, in religion, allowed to endure and explain this life as a step towards a hereafter of bliss, now precisely becomes the opposite of bliss in the only acknowledged kingdom: life, here below, which could be represented as a vast dull plain, in which some small hillocks rise, at measurable distance, that are called pleasure. The principle of pleasure thus becomes implicit, and pain is damned. For the plain, blond and bland, still shelters some shell craters that are no longer the huge cracks of unbearable pain, or of the torture of souls, but disappointments, slowness, disillusions, and, in a word that combines this landscape with its psycho-medical by-product: depressions. Life, deprived of God, verified in matter and distributed to each living being, among which humans, has become individualist like the bourgeois.

Lastly, the status of death changes deeply. It cannot be considered as a one-way passage that only Orpheus can go through in both directions anymore, nor as the mythical interchange between life here below, imperfect and sad, and life hereafter, pure bliss or deserved punishment. First it is opposed to life, because it is the moment when the absence of life appears, then it is excluded from life as its contrary, as its enemy. Death, including in the most common thought, becomes the evil of life, and even the evil of which life is the good.

Death being excluded from life, and perceived as what negates it, although it is only a part of life, may be one of the strangest changes in our views, one of the deepest of the past century. Death being opposed to life, although it is only its end, is a deep modification of the representation of the world. Surprise or interest for death, or even curiosity, not mentionning a taste that would nowadays be called morbid, gave way to horror and disgust. The legitimacy to put oneself to death, and the importance of knowing how to receive it, have become taboos.

To exclude death from life, it also is to exclude the end. And excluding the end of life has brought back, under an alienated form, the old religious myth: deprived of any end by the exclusion of death, life has become infinite, eternal. As death is split from life, the poor’s dream of a better life that they would not need to make themselves, is prolonged in the illusion, without landmarks yet deeply established, of an endless life. Infinite life, through the abolition of death, is indeed the absurd and sickening ideology of the middleclass.

The signs of death, hence, disappear one after the other. Though burrials remain pompous, they do rather for commercial reasons than to honour the dead; mourning, on the other hand, has disappeared to such a point that one could say the middleclass has brought its mourning of mourning to closure; the act of dying is only considered as a stereotyped tragedy, an accident, an impropriety anymore; even rites, preserved by religion to establish the formalities of the passage towards infinity, the colours of death, the celebrations and the reverences are chased away from the salons of reason, and from the screens of voluntary servitude. The deep selfishness of the affliction of death, which deprives the living of allies, of support, of forces, fades away. For death has lost its meaning. Facing the denial of its end, how could life have kept its own meaning?

3. The Stuationists have carried the ideology of life as the purpose of everyone and all the furthest. At no time did they seem to question the reason for this presupposition. For life as a purpose is extremely disputable. In order to show a first limit to this thesis, which has become a prejudice, here it is, summed up in a completely stupid proposition: the purpose of life is life.

To uphold such a position, the Situationists, however, have brought to life, very abstract denomination that has also carried more spiritual names – play, breath, movement, alienation – a very meaningful distinction. They have divided it between life and survival. Survival is the world of the need, what is common to all animals, if not all plants; life is the intelligent content that survival may have or not have: it is the historical life, accessible only to humans.

This distinction, that still remains minor at our time, is an interesting attempt to spark off an other, a contrary to life. Here, life regains the excellence that hereafter had in theism, and the mediocrity of life here below falls to survival. Except that the excellence of life is awaiting us here below, in the conquest of communism and the total man, at the end of prehistory which then becomes history. Life is not the long, peaceful river of the ironic advertisers, for it has what the middleclass lacks: a meaning – even though here, one must remark that this meaning leads beyond oneself. Life that brings paradise back to Earth, communism, conceals the religious infinity of the goal behind the illusion of proximity. But the outcome of life looks resembles Zeno’s paradox, not because by moving forward, one never reaches the purpose of one’s movement, but because one does not even dare imagining the goal as achieved, for its first, terrible effect would be that there would be nothing to achieve anymore; and yet one would have to live. Only the distance from this goal allows one to forget that life, in its entirety, is the realisation of a goal. Without a goal, there is no life.

For the Situationists, life and survival meet in a “good” dualism. The passage that separates them is no longer death, but revolution. And it works both ways, that is one can access excellence but just as well degrade from it, even though theory does not foresee any regress in the linear progress that leads from the world of survival into the world of life. While alienation could be subject to disalienation, revolution sees no return to an Old Rule but as a repulsive spectre. As indicated by the prefix ‘pre’ in prehistory, once survival abolished, we enter in history, and just like survival, prehistory will be abolished. The fact that there is no concrete, explicit representation of this much talked-about history that fills our eternal future of bliss, quite shows how shallow this daydream is.

But the distinction between survival and life carries an imperative of future. It no longer establishes life in the sole materiality, and revokes the primacy of a solely organic life as a ground principle. By raising life over the survival of animals and plants, the Situationist stance starts, more implicitly than explicitly, a critique of the Christian dogma of the interdiction of death. This dogma, indeed, often justified by the necessity for the kind to survive, is in contradiction with the tendency of mankind to kill each other, which is much revealed by the very necessity of the interdiction itself, not to mention its new principle, pleasure. Through division between life and survival, we may even dare affirm, thus going further than the Situationists, that the ability to kill, from human to human, makes humanity more fertile, if fertility is the goal. Killing can indeed also be an element of the debate, dangerous of course, but not to kill may sometimes be more dangerous for humanity than to kill. Brutus’s tragedy is the issue of whether killing a tyrant is a humane act. The taste or the will to kill, which everyone knows so well, is experienced, even when it is suppressed at the very moment it appears, as a broadening of horizons, of the possible, a stand, an assumption of responsibility. To end life is always a way to give content to a life. The assassin enjoys a power of completeness that the submissive infinitist renounces.

The Situationists had asserted their opposition between survival and life as a double positivity. Their attack against survival is only a depreciation of this form of life according to which the poor are organised. Although life had to overcome survival, it was not in the Hegelian sense of overcoming as supersession, that is, while preserving what is overcome, but by annihilating it. Life would no longer be based and organised on need, which would become secondary: this means that to die of hunger, or to risk an insufficient reproduction of mankind, was no longer considered as a preliminary to the questions of humanity; these questions had become secondary, for they were assumed solved at the stage of evolution achieved by humans. Yet this life, which had suppressed need, had not found any other goal for itself than that one, and thus had not found any purpose. The suppression of need, its annihilation, “never work”, is a formula and, precisely, does not come from life; or else, as a vague teenage whim that does not want to endure pain any longer, in a short-sighted urgency. The Situationist provocation has not abolished need.

The Situationists have not looked for a goal beyond this childish attitude. To them, life is an individual life, and the purpose of life is to live a full or generous individual life. The model of this life is Debord’s life, bohemian, thug, theorician, rebel, who, even in a prehistoric time, makes history among a thousand other rich and original activities, while avoiding the daily life habits in perfect freedom. This idealization of a sort of poetic journey across existence only looks to Debord’s actual life, so long as he can hide that the deep unsatisfaction of our time is also in his life, that he also has to share the misery of the poor; and by misery of the poor, I mean the submissions, the defeats, the humiliations, the stupor, the lack of insight, the inability to manage the anxious balance between life and its possible. By swashbuckling and boasting, Debord has constantly concealed the failures and the insufficiencies of his own life, as if the excellence of an individual could, for itself, abolish them, and as if he, who was yet so notoriously defeated in his historical project, could be such an example.

Debord’s lifestylism deserves such a long mention because he is one of the archetypes of lifestylism, an ideology that has generalized in the middleclass society. A generously lived life, in fact, has become everyone’s goal, both among declared enemies of this society like Debord, and simply among frenetic enthusiasts of some of the commodities that this society produces or of the activities it tolerates. One has indeed to admit that what had the better of boredom was not a revolution, as the Situationists were still projecting it, but the current society, which managed to make the poor wander within a narrow pump that sucks energy and ideas, between exciting screens and ever-renewed anguish: the well-known secret of this Orwellian repression is to work on brains faster than they can take, stress, controlled frenzies, hypertension and anaemia strictly pace this dispossession of the ill. Very wrongly, the Situationists bitterly sniggered, as they saw that governments were establishing ministries of the Quality of Life: the state, commodity and dominant communication were fighting for an idealised life, just as the Situationists were; they only had different, if not competing, formulations thereof. Similarly, in the ideology of culture for everyone, a narrow and dull field of creation for all the poor as soon as their workweek is over takes shape. Quite righly, the dominant lifestylism has exhibited models that were just as exciting as the thug-poet of the anti-artistic artistic tradition of the 20th century: the startup founder wearing jeans and sneakers, the great adventurer-interpreter-mercenary-consultant between the state wars, the extreme sportsman riding a motorbike in the desert or bungee jumping off great metal bridges, as well as some more classic figures such as the Lolita who became a model thanks to a reality-show, then an actress or a singer, the great cook who endlessly creates new flavours, or the stock exchange trader, bewildered by fortunes greater than those of the greatest states, yet that he clumsily plays with.

4. For modern teleology, life first is a quality of things. It is a breath, but there is pleasure in this breath, it is a beat, and there is blood, beating up to the ears. There is movement, there is change. This quality corresponds to a moment, and this moment is one of vigor, often of joy too, a full moment, but not of fullness, because this moment is a beginning, and its continuation is unknown and unsure. So there is also, together with much joyful energy, uncertainty. This quality corresponds to the common expression “full of life”.

Such a conception transcends what is biologically alive: a work, an idea, an event can be “full of life”. It also transcends the individual: life, as a quality, can be shared by different individuals, and can even be understood as their momentary community. That which unites individuals to each other, in their action, is life. Life is a quality of things, but it is ephemeral, and present in acts.

For, more fundamentally, the teleological conception of life agrees with the Situationist division between life and survival. Life is the colour that action gives to things; survival is the preservation of things. In this opposition, life is momentary and has the quality of change, while survival is perennial. What is inseparable from life as opposed to survival, is creation, the unexpected, the superiority of what lives compared to what only survives.

The passage between survival and life is indeed, as for the Situationists, revolt; the moment when, precisely, what is there is changed. Here, the opposite passage also exists, when from life, one falls back into survival. It is the defeat of revolt, whether by repression, possibly death, recuperation, weariness or resignation.

Life is what makes the meaning of things, which is why it has appeared as a quality of things. So, fundamentally, life is a quality, not exactly of things, but of meaning. Through life, this sparkle of things, through this ephemeral transcendence, through this negation of survival as the imperative necessity, the meaning of the things that bear life takes shape. By living so, by creating, by transcending, appears the meaning, not only of the things that bear life, but the meaning of totality.

Life, in modern teleology, is what gives meaning, that is life is the process by which meaning is born to things, which themselves are nothing but a result of thought. Meaning does not depend on life, but on the goal, which is itself created and proposed at the heart of life. Yet life is what “gives life” to the goal in things. This is one of its deepest differences from survival, which not only does not give life to any goal, but negates and annihilates the goal.

Thus life is the condition of the goal: it is in life that the goal is worked out, and that is where modern teleology differs from classic teleology, in which the goal is a given outside of life. Naming the goal, that is, carrying it out, is the object of life; it is indeed the meaning of the old philosophical question: what is the meaning of life?

But, the other way around, life also is the transmission of the such-named goal to things, which means it is the transmission of the goal from one to another, it is a communication. Here again, activity characterizes life as opposed to passivity of survival: transmission, communication of the goal, its reception and its critique are the work of those who live, while the acceptance without creation, or the enforcement of the transmission without questioning the content, is what characterizes survival.

Life thus reaches a double meaning. Life is where the goal is created, but life itself is the quality that allows the goal to be transmitted. It is both the vast whole that gathers the conditions for creation, and the condition for communication. Here we see that it is life, as opposed to survival, that gives meaning, or does not, to survival. Life is nothing but creating meaning for life, and carrying it out. As meaning is the determination of the goal, life also depends on the goal of the creation for which it is a necessary condition.

That is the main difference, a fundamental one, between the teleological and the Situationist conceptions of life. Life depends on the goal, but this goal is not life itself. For the Situationists, life was the purpose of life by default. Life was the supreme category, so its goal could only be itself. In modern teleology, life is a quality of what is there, thus not at all the totality of what is there. The totality of what is there, however, does have a goal. And even though this goal has a necessary condition – to be created and proposed, and so to be created and proposed in life – and though it has another necessary condition – to be communicated and so carried out in an action that has the quality that is called life – the goal transcends life.

What separates life from totality, indeed, is like the life of thought. But thought lacks the quality of the living: it does not only contain creation, and even though this non-living thought is human, changes and moves, it is not in transcendence or in the accomplishment of the possible (the accomplishment of the possible is the eschatological form of life). Survival is a part of this thought of non-life, as the Situationists had remarked. And more generally, alienation is the thought that separates life from totality and from the goal of totality. But unlike the Situationist thought, modern teleology does not moralize alienation. Alienation is a thought that is necessary to totality, and that is necessary to life.

So there is an alterity, an other to life. The goal proposed by modern teleology is the accomplishment of the unity between this other and life. That is why, in modern teleology, life depends on the goal. The meaning of life is the meaning of the goal of the whole humanity, of the totality of thought, in its movement, whether or not it bears the quality of life.

In other words: the goal determines life. The reason why there is life is because there is a goal. Life is the manifestation of the creation of the goal, and life is the manifestation of its realisation. But as long as its realisation is only a project, its creation is only a hypothesis, that is, various acknowledgements, partially satisfactory. Life thus has a meaning: the expression of the goal. The Situationists thought that the goal of life was life because their vision of life simply was immature. The goal of life is the accomplishment of life, which is very different. Life is meaningful, and this meaning, for which life itself does not suffice, can be elucidated. Looking for, finding, modifying and realising its own meaning actually is one of the characteristics of this eminent quality of things.

This conception of life means that there is a precondition for life. This precondition for life is spirit, of which life is a moment, a quality, a determination, a negation. The here-and-now, which forms the beginning of the search for the origin that leads to the accomplishment, to the annihilation of the fundamental unsatisfaction, is a compound or a mediation, as immediacy only exists as a representation, and as a result of a movement of thought. Likewise, life is a result of the movement of alienation of humanity.

5. In modern teleology, life thus is a particular moment of the movement of spirit. And although the end of life is the accomplishment of humanity, life is also divided according to the objects in which it opposes the spirit that generates it. To consider that some of these objects are human individuals, which can be defined biologically, as beings capable of thought, so of spirit, and who can be places of life, between what is commonly called birth and death, is a currently acceptable hypothesis.

Such an individual life thus depends on the most general goal, the realisation of totality. It primarily is a place of creation, it is the moment of the research of the meaning. So those who are living, among the human individuals, are primarily only those who create and research the meaning of life. But they are then joined by all those who have not looked for this meaning, but who discuss, argue and criticize the meanings that are proposed to them. Human life essentially is a debate on the meaning and on the goal of humanity. In this also it is the contrary of survival.

It must be pointed out that this very general acknowledgement is currently alienated by the results of the arguments that take place on the question of the realisation of humanity in history. The domination of survival over life, for instance, is a very important result, and very harmful for life, and for the realisation of humanity. Yet unlike the Situationists, the modern teleologues do not think that survival should be annihilated. They simply recommend that the relationship between survival and life should be reversed in the order of priorities, so that survival, consciously and in the organisation of the community of humans, depends on life, instead of life being perceived as an ultimate reward when all the tasks of survival are done, as it is the case today.

That individual life, as opposed to survival, is the historical life, also is a Situationist view that looks like provocation and simplification. In fact, not all qualitative breaks, not all beginnings of debate won from survival are historical, or historical yet. But modern teleology upholds that making history is the heart of the meaning of life. For making history is to go towards the accomplishment of humanity.

A life, one that is not just a survival, thus cannot be conceived outside history. That is why the meaning of history, the sensibility of the progress of the debate of humanity on itself, and the ability to understand the facts and events according to this goal, are essential characteristics of individual life. The debate of humanity as a whole is indeed a relation that rational observation alone cannot grasp. One also needs a certain quality, a certain ability that may be called transcendence, in order to capture the identity between the march of time and one’s own ability to localise in it, then to take part in it, and even to affect it.

Indeed, in the historic ability, this anxious global view, which is not afraid to get lost in details, lies the realisation of the vastest needs. Needs are what is defined by unsatisfaction; and the vastest needs are those that require the participation of all the thinking individuals. This conclusion of unsatisfaction is the meaning of history. And while one needs much lucidity, patience and knowledge to consider this conclusion, one also needs a certain way of being, ready to risk everything when one knows one has the right “rhythm”, and even one a bit faster than this world which makes us and which we make. Within the given time are only very few opportunities to gamble everything in history: life is what allows to create these opportunities and to take them; survival does not.

However, although history is indeed the noble pathway of humanity, the most certain way from here-and-now to totality, and ultimately the crossroad of life, it is doubled with less visible tracks, often underground, sometimes inextricably winding, then suddenly straight. The project of pushing alienation so far as to moving it out of the way, which is the essence of the general assembly of mankind, also is the essence of another debate, love. While history is the kingdom of the distinguished, love, which is a particularly fertile form of alienation, is that of smuggling. Thus, between history and love, life hovers like between the rule and the exception, like between totality and the most extreme particularity, like between the clamor of the unfurled banners and the silence of the orgasms fuelled with pain.

And other things than love may prove to be what saps, but also what fuels history, to the point that life comes to draw its rambling twists from them. For quality, transcendence themselves, are nothing but the ability to catch without betraying a coherence, a project, an ambition. Even when it makes out its meaning, this meaning is only the chosen hypothesis; and life is the sovereign of unexpectedness and surprise, of wrong-foot and laughter. Life is the territory of creation, a game, and those who claim to create while working are the waged liars of survival.

So life essentially owes its anxious attention to those two greatness – that of history, and that of love. When one of them lacks, life is hard. When both lack, life is miserable, there is no life. Is it then necessarily a relapse into survival? Not always: it is also where one may meet death.

6. Death is the only known end of life. But its peculiarity is that it also is the end of survival.

One cannot experience death. To experience something is to be able to acknowledge it and project from this acknowledgement. Now if a human individual can acknowledge someone else’s death, one can never acknowledge one’s own. Death is the archetype of the event that cannot be acknowledged. In this very common event, there is something at the same time inevitable, and unknowable. Each human individual will know this event, but only once, and without being able to acknowledge it. A mystery that will be revealed, but without delivering any possible, an end that does not tolerate any thereafter, an irreversible that cannot be relativized – those are a few aspects of this terrifying and fascinating secret.

In survival, death is the ultimate and the absolute. That is why it is sacred. In life, death is only the end of a part of life, that of an individual, that of me. Just as the goal of life transcends life as widely as alienation is wide, life reaches beyond death as widely as the goal is wide. Life is a game of perspectives, in space-time, in spirit, and that is why the sight of the living, the players, reaches beyond the end of their own participation. The players, the living, aim at a goal that commits their whole life: they know, they feel that, with less of a commitment, they cannot achieve it. This goal goes beyond their life. The game of life is only the ambition of making them coincide.

Death here is a danger only for the individual. But as the game – of history or of love – reaches beyond the individual, death is only an incident of this game. Not meaning that the players despise it or even ignore it. Death is there indeed, as the possible end of their participation to the game, a real danger. But the players, the living, know that if they do not risk their life, then they have not played, they have not lived. This is another deep difference between life and survival: to risk their survival is a serious mistake for individuals as long as they have not defined the goal of their life; to risk their survival is not a mistake for those who know for what goal they live; what may be a minor mistake is to die without achieving it.

Death is a catastrophe only because survival has no goal. Survival is the wait for the goal, and submission is the belief that the goal will come, that it shall not be created, or that the enunciated goals shall not be discussed. On the contrary, in life, death is a stage of the game, a risk to be run in order to verify one’s commitment, an important, sometimes tragic incident, but never primary. For life, even individual life, must be thought, not from the point of view of the individual, but of mankind. The profound difference between survival and life is that life contains the accomplishment of the totality of the kind, while the horizon and the perspective of survival are restricted to the individual. That is why death, in survival, is the end of all, while the true end of all is in the victory in the game of life.

Death is a means of life. Killing, dying, are attempts, game phases, perspectives. Examples include the death penalty, the initiation of young warriors, abortion, the assassination of a tyrant, or the calculation of killing a restricted amount of humans in order to save a larger amount. Killing, dying, are also ways to express oneself by using the dominant rules, or, on the opposite, by undermining them. It is not certain whether current society, which has ejected death out of life, accomplishes its project of preserving survival better than if it taught death from the youngest age – how to deliver it, how to understand it. But, facing the taboo of death, it only demands obedience, without being able to explain its reasons anymore.

Just as the conservation of humanity is a responsibility and a theme of the general assembly of mankind, death is a responsibility and a theme of the individual. This is especially true for one’s own death. The human individuals who live know their goals. They must know where the game they have begun is at, if their goals are still within reach, or if they must leave the game, if they can or cannot withdraw their commitment. The living can thus fall back into survival, and wait for a better opportunity; but few of them will agree to retreat. For the goals of a life are nothing but the expression of the intensity one gives it. If these goals are out of reach, they will never come back.

The teleologues, for instance, have built their commitment on youth and offensive. Today, in the western regions, youth is crushed by oldness, and the offensive of the preceding time got stuck, without the next one seeming to be at work yet. The game of love also has lost some of its possible, crushed by the time and mislead in incommunicability, not without dismay.

And as noted by Montaigne about his life, warning that one must always keep an anxious account of its ending, one must also know that if the end of life agrees to retreat into the mediocrity of survival, it infects all past life with this remission. The end of something often is what reveals it.

Because the teleological conception of life is the most ambitious there is, it holds death as an important secondary problem. And it proposes to learn to handle this end, while respecting life.

Text of 2009

www.teleologie.org/TO/teleologie/09_choix.htm

Translated by a third party in 2009, revised in 2013 – Contact: historyhereandnow@gmail.com