A Pragmatic Approach

What will you do, and how will you live, when you know that there is nothing after or beyond this life? Will you live life more fully, more wholeheartedly because your eyes are not fixed on the pie in the sky? Or rather: will you dread that incomprehensible void of non-existence more than any hell that religious imagery could conjure? Will you live more carefully, guard your life more jealously, because death to you is not a passage but an end so complete that you dare not look upon it, lest it take hold of your mind, and all possibility of significance vanish before the yawning vastness of its irrevocable negation? Will you become obsessed with safety, pile precaution upon precaution, try to leave no chink where the cold wind of void may enter— but all in vain, of course. Will you live then in a world of dross, a world where nothing is valued so high as the extension, however incremental, of this life? Will you devote yourself to the material, to diet and nutrition, to fitness and health, to sterilization of surfaces and utensils, to food storage regulations? Will you live in terror of hazardous chemicals, of hidden poisons and sudden accidents? Will you discover then that every moment is precious, not in that it is full of secret ecstatic meaning, but in that you dread to lose it more than you dread any humiliation or decrepitude and will pay whatever price for a few more of the same?

And if, on the other hand, you believe that the soul survives the boundaries of this life, that it sheds the body like a snake its skin, and slithers on to unknown realms, will you give up all joy and lust for life in patient waiting for future rewards? Will your vision be dim to earthly beauty, earthly pain, earthly joy, because your mind is fixed on that other world? Or rather: will you live here more fully for living here more lightly? In caring less for flesh and more for spirit, will you perhaps live more truly in the world, and find yourself closer to its real ecstasies and tragedies? If you do not think that the closing curtain of death renders everything flat and equal, voids all pain and joy, settles all accounts to zero—will these pains and joys not then seem far more significant? And if you happen to believe that pain here in this world corresponds to joy in that other and joy here to pain there, will this reversal of meanings laid atop the immediate visceral meanings not rather enrich than impoverish them?

For this world is already half spirit.

I make no metaphysical claims. By spirit I mean only those substances that are perceived by the heart and the intellect: we are sensible to them, we encounter them, feel them, cannot avoid them. To say that those substances are not “real” in the way that other substances are real is to draw an artificial distinction. What do we mean by "real" if not that which we cannot avoid?