The Will to Live
by Ivan Ciric
February 20, 2012
The
Introduction
Let me start by saying that over the years I witnessed the Will to Live practically on a daily basis. The 7 year old girl with a brain stem tumor, the 32 year old pregnant woman with a ruptured aneurysm and the octogenarian with an incurable malignant brain tumor, all exhibited hope and a Will to Live when faced with the potential of a life ending adversity. I am also confident that all of us can recall stories of survival of people in peril, like the one about the congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford or about Brian Anderson, the Iraqi war veteran who lost three limbs to a RSB and not only survived, but with a sheer Will to Live, beat all odds and is now a highly functional human being. Let us also remember, with deepest respect, the incredible Will to Live of those who survived the greatest suffering humanity had to endure just this past Century. Viennese psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) attributed his survival in part to finding Meaning to Life, even under the most egregiously inhumane circumstances of his captivity. As I reflected on these observations and did some reading on the subject, I gradually realized that besides our individual Will to Live there is also a transcendent Will to Live that serves a larger, although on first glance less apparent purpose of Preservation of Life in general and of Humanity in particular. In spite of having been exposed to calamities throughout its history, such as epidemics, wars and all forms of persecutions, humanity has survived and thrived. Clearly, human survival requires that the balance between life and death be stacked in favor of the former.
Anatomy, Physiology and Psychology
In search for an explanation of
humanity’s Will to Live let me start with the obvious premise that the
natural birth of a new life is the product of procreation. Human eroticism and
hence procreation are largely dependent on visual and even more so on tactile
sensations. Interestingly enough, this rather simple intuitive fact has
nonetheless been a frequent subject of artistic expression. For example, the
blatant, lascivious ogling and the lecherous, groping hands of the elders in
the biblical story of erotic desire Susana
and the Elders, were immortalized on canvas by a score of artists,
including Tintoretto, Allori, Rubens, Rembrandt and
Tiepolo. The visual and tactile sensations are conveyed first to the corresponding
areas of the brain and from there to the pre-frontal area, where our
intellectual response to the potentially erotic stimuli is composed. Under
non-erotic circumstances the intellectual response is all you get. Under erotic
circumstances, however, the sensory information is transmitted further to a
small cortical area situated deep along the inner aspect of the frontal lobe,
called the septal area, and to the hypothalamus where
Eros is awakened, yet not potent
enough without further kindling of the erotic stimuli. The erotic sensation is
therefore reinforced through a series of circular neuronal connections, collectively
known as the limbic system, that reverberate back and forth to the septal area and the hypothalamus. Along the way these
circuits connect to the hippocampus, our memory storage, where previous similar
erotic experiences are awakened, as well as to a number of other centers known
to augment the libidinous sensation and erotic experience. And so, an initial innocent,
or may be not so innocent look or touch can lead to an awakening, charging and
supercharging of the septal area and the hypothalamus
to a point where this energy build up, this physiological foreplay of our
limbic brain, is released in the moment of ecstasy via a neuronal bundle, a.k.a.
as the hedonic highway, down to our
spinal cord where it finally results in a sympathetic discharge, an act that
keeps humanity going strong.
A search of medical literature on the relationship between our erotic engine and the human mind leads inevitably to Sigmund Freud. Perhaps inspired by Caravaggio’s painting Eros and by Breughel’s the Triumph of Death, Freud believed that humans are driven by two conflicting desires: the Life Instinct or Eros and the Death Instinct, which he named Thanatos. Clearly, in this struggle Freud’s Life Instinct has been victorious, because if death was to vanquish reproduction and thus negate birth and renewal, this would be the end of humanity as we know it. Freud attributed the Life Instinct to the unconscious or repressed state of mind, our Id that is behind the procreative drive and passions in general. He contrasted the Id to our conscious state or Ego, with attributes such as reasoning and common sense, and to the partially conscious state or Super Ego, our inherited moral compass. Left to their devices both Id and the Super Ego could become destructive, the former through incessant pleasure seeking and the latter by suppressing the Id to the point of silencing it completely and thus playing into the hands of Thanatos. Freud concluded that Ego rationally balances the hedonism of the Id and the moralism of the Super Ego. This is in keeping with the reasoning of social evolutionists that acquired cultural knowledge in the realms of art, science and in the multitude of different social diversions may be competing with, or even replacing the genetic knowledge of erotic pleasure seeking as a basis for happiness and fulfillment. Clearly, such constellation of human priorities, prevalent in highly developed societies, would tend to influence reproduction in a negative way.
Philosophy
While this short primer gives a glimpse into the anatomy, physiology and psychology of human reproduction, it leaves the question as to the instigator that is behind humanity’s Quest for Immortality largely unanswered. In the hope of finding the answer to that mystery let us switch gears now and see what we can learn by looking through the metaphysical lens of philosophers.
Among the earliest texts to address immortality are the pre Buddhist philosophical essays, the revered Upanishads that are at the core of Hindu philosophical thought. The centerpiece of Upanishad philosophy is Atman and Brahman. Atman is our true inner self, the core of our very being, our own eternal soul. On the other hand, Brahman is the transcendent Universal Spirit, creator of the universe and giver of life, but more importantly Brahman is the desired Destiny of All Existence. To know self through introspection and asceticism, to achieve the state of Atman, is the path to becoming one with Brahman and so, finally, escape the chain of reincarnation. This synthesis of Atman and Brahman, of self and eternity, is not only the essence of Upanishad philosophy, but it also influenced western philosophers from ancient Greece to Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer and others.
While the Upanishads were concerned primarily with the fate of man in the realm of eternity, Greek philosophers were generally more interested in the ethics of man’s relationship to the society and in forms of governance. Nonetheless, Plato (424-348 BC) in his Dialogues - speaking through the mouth of Socrates – proclaimed the Immortality of the Soul. Plato also believed that the empirical world of our senses is only a distorted replica of a transcendent and divinely ordained world of Ideal Forms that is inaccessible to ordinary folks. It is only the few king philosophers, who have escaped from the cave of darkness, to whom this divine reality is revealed. This dualistic concept, of a divine world of Ideal Forms on one hand and of the contingent and imperfect world on the other, emphasizes being over becoming and it also became a recurrent theme throughout the history of philosophy.
In contrast to Plato’s dualistic concept his pupil Aristotle (384-332 B.C.), this versatile genius, teacher of Alexander the Great and protagonist of logical thinking, who in his Lyceum set the foundation of modern science by introducing deductive reasoning, believed in the opposite, holomorphic concept that God from which all life derives, including the Will to Live, and nature are one and the same. Aristotelian morphing into one of divine and nature, with both subject to change, gives primacy to becoming over being and it also became an important template for metaphysical thought of future philosophers.
We would surely be remiss at this juncture not to mention the influence of Judeo-Christian-Islamic teaching of the omnipotence of God in all aspects of human life. The Genesis offers a straightforward, albeit likely allegoric explanation as to the origin of our universe and life. Genesis also underscores the Immortality of Life, alas not to be granted to humans because of their primordial sin of having reached for the tree of knowledge: "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever. He drove out the man; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis III, 22-24). It would appear though that God had a change of heart. Faith based teaching of redemption aside, the death of Christ has been interpreted by some as a parallel to the terrestrial mortality of each and every one of us and His resurrection as a pledge to the Immortality of Humanity.
Among Christian philosophers St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) deserves center stage. Brought up in Aristotelian teachings, this hulky aristocrat and “dumb ox”, as some of his teachers have called him, Thomas, in his major work Summa Theologica, expressed the belief that the desire to live and procreate, the Will to Live, is a basic human value endowed by God and thus immutable and eternal. It is remarkable in what detail Thomas went in elaborating on the subject of human sexuality, having classified acceptable and unacceptable forms of sexual gratification. In a hint of what we know today of the Cambrian and other great extinctions, Thomas also advanced evolutionist ideas that some organic forms, that he thought had arisen in Genesis, could not be preserved and thus perished. Thomas attributed his views to two forms of revelations: natural through reasoning and super-natural through faith. He believed that they are complimentary and as such was one of the first to attempt to reconcile science and faith.
During the Middle Ages science and metaphysical inquiry were largely kept at arm’s length. Commensurate with the reawakening of sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Copernicus, Galilei, Keppler, Newton), philosophical inquiry also re-emerged with Renee Descartes (1596-1650; cogito ergo sum), Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and especially with Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) in Holland, whose thoughts concerning the permanency of life are pertinent to this discourse.
Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in Amsterdam, Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism because of his views that the God of Moses was non-existent and for his Aristotelian like pantheism that God and nature are one and the same and therefore, beholden to a single deterministic system. Since humans are an extension of the God-nature universality their ever present Quest for Immortality, the Will to Live, is predetermined through this unity of God and nature. To quote Spinoza: “everything endeavors to persist in its own being and this endeavor is the actual essence of that thing”.
The philosophical landscape in the 18th Century was dominated by Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Transcendental Idealism. Most assuredly influenced by Plato, Kant advanced his dualistic concept of noumenal and phenomenal worlds. After hedging initially as to the existence of transcendental knowledge, Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, concluded that the noumenal world of The Thing in Itself, a timeless and spaceless Source of All Existence, is off limits to human mind and thus never to be known. In contrast, the empirical knowledge of the phenomenal world surrounding us is a combination of sensory perceptions and inherent to the mind ability (“categories”) to mold the perceptions into ideas, including the concepts of space and time.
Meanwhile and by contrast, in neighboring France such arcane philosophy temporarily faded into the background. Instead, Voltaire (1694-1778), this irreverent genius of word and satire, who with his writings promoted civil liberties and enlightened the bourgeois class of imperial France and the also in the Pantheon in glory enshrined romanticist Rousseau (1712-1772), whose Social Contract (1762) inspired the Revolution, were more concerned with the societal upheavals caused by the excesses of the crown and church than with the ethereal Will to Live. Still, Rousseau believed that the love of self, representing human desire for preservation, is a positive force.
Coming on the heels Voltaire’s Age of Reason and Kant’s Idealism, in an era when Europe was exhausted by wars and uprisings, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) came of age and in 1818 published The World as Will and Idea. To quote Schopenhauer …”the Will is the thing-in-itself the inner content, the essence of Life. The visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the Will, (reminiscent of Plato and Kant). If Will exists, so will life and the world exist! Life is therefore assured to the Will to Live and as long as we are with the Will to Live we need not have fear for our existence, even in the face of death”. According to Schopenhauer therefore, the larger meaning of the Will to Live is not salvation of the individual, but of humanity at large with the individual life subordinate to the survival of the species. Such non-libertarian view, to say the least, was otherwise validated in the biological sense when we consider that all of us share the same DNA we inherited from our ancient ancestors some 200 thousand years ago.
Besides willing life Schopenhauer’s Will is also the instigator of all human desires. Lack of lasting gratification brings desolation and suffering. The only way to attain salvation is to renounce the Will and alleviate the suffering of others. Schopenhauer suggests that this noble state can be achieved through self denial and chastity, both so counter-intuitive to the primary mission of the Will to Live and clearly a daunting task, for he himself fathered a child out of wedlock. Schopenhauer concludes that the words in Lord’s Prayer …”and lead us not into temptation” is perhaps a “desperate plea by man for release from the clutches of the Will”.
In the wake of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) came on the scene and in his works Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil subverted and corrupted Schopenhauer’s Will to Live into the Will to Power. He did so under the guise of Perspectivism that declared knowledge and thus science, but much more importantly truth and thus morality as relative and self-serving at best. Unfortunately, this opportunistic philosophy was later adopted by Nazis as a modus operandi for their work of evil.
Certainly, one of the most important contributions to human understanding of Life in the 19th Century was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Philosophers Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Henry Bergson (1859-1941) were early proponents of Darwin’s theory of evolution: Spencer with his “survival of the fittest” and Bergson with his Élan vital construed as an evolutionary version of the Will to Live.
Even though philosophical thought continued robustly into the 20th Century the ever growing body of scientific discoveries, especially in the realm of cosmology, particle physics and molecular biology, led to a gradual shift in focus toward science conducted in the broader sense of a search for the ultimate reality of existence.
Science
Since organic life and thus humanity are a product of the inorganic matter created with the birth of our universe, the answer as to the origin of the humanity’s Will to Live should perhaps be sought in light of the Laws of Nature that are the basis of our existence. What is a Law of Nature? According to the Australian astrophysicist Paul Davies and agreed to by many others (including: Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Leon Lederman, Brian Swimme), a Law of Nature is a theory rooted in observation and supported by science, mostly mathematics, that is universally applicable, absolute under all circumstances, timeless and eternal in character and most importantly reproducible by future observers.
Let us review briefly the fundamental Laws of Nature. It is generally agreed that our universe began some 14 billion years ago in an event colloquially known as the “big bang”, when it was unleashed in a torrent of energy and subatomic particles from an infinitesimally small and infinitely dense and hot “nothingness”, usually referred to as a singularity. Cosmologists and particle physicists also agree that there was a common origin to energy and matter in the primordial singularity where they were one and the same, in perfect harmony that was disrupted once and for all by the “big bang”. Nowhere have science, philosophy and faith converged closer than around the question as to what caused this harmony of the singularity to be disrupted. To date there is no answer to that mystery. Hence, all Laws of Nature relative to our existence are only valid starting a millionth of a second after the “big bang” and onward through the ages. As the universe continued to expand and thus age, the concept of space/time was also born. There was no space and no time, no where or when, at the very moment of the birth of our universe. This is in keeping with the ecclesiastical teaching that God created the world “ex nihilo” and with St. Augustine’s saying, as far back as the fifth Century, that God created the universe “with time and not in time”. The Laws of Nature that explain formation of celestial bodies in the ever expanding universe are mainly Newton’s Theory of Gravitation (E=M1 + M2/D2) and Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, a four dimensional space/time concept that replaced the ages old Aristotelian assertion that space and time are separate dimensions. Einstein also resolved the apparent paradox of an expanding universe in the presence of gravitational forces. He did so with his cosmological constant, a mathematical concept that was recently validated with the discovery of anti-gravitational dark matter.
As it happened though, the theories of Gravitation and General Relativity, applicable to the vast expanses of the mature universe break down at the subatomic world of the early, “baby” universe when released energy waves converted into particles and thus gave spontaneous rise to matter. Consequently, a different scientific paradigm was necessary in order to explain the highly unstable events occurring in the immediate aftermath of the “big bang”. Even though Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (E=mc2), that energy is inter-convertible with matter, provided the first hint in this regard, the new paradigm was based mainly on the Principle of Uncertainty and the still evolving Quantum Physics. Both theories predict probabilities rather than certainties, as for example when it comes to predicting the position of a particle (electron) when it behaves like matter, versus its momentum when it assumes properties of energy waves. As such, Quantum Physics is counterintuitive and it even puzzled Einstein who famously said that God surely “does not play dice with the universe”. Yet, Quantum Physics has not only proven repeatedly accurate to the point where it was elevated to the pedestal of a Law of Nature, but it also became the essential bedrock of our computerized/digital/electronic age. Using Quantum Physics as a template, particle physicists created the so called Standard Model of the nascent universe that incorporates all the known elemental building blocks of nature and all the constituent forces in the universe, except for gravity and the mathematically anticipated, but still elusive Higgs boson (a.k.a. as the “God’s Particle”) that is thought to be the key to the mystery as to how the elemental particles actually accrued mass; a clue to the diversity of our existence.
Scientists soon discovered, however, that the Standard Model applicable to the microcosm of the “big bang” was mathematically incompatible with Gravity and General Relativity that are applicable to the universe at large. Consequently, new Quantum Gravity theories have been proposed in an attempt to reconcile and unify the two sets of seemingly incongruous Laws of Nature. One of the Quantum Gravity theories, the Super String Theory, hailed as a path to the Theory of Everything (TOE), is based on mathematical concepts of infinitely small resonating string particles that represent interchangeably all of the up till now discovered particles and energy forces, in what is presumed to be a mind boggling multidimensional universe. The science behind the Quantum Gravity theories however, is still debated because of which they have not been elevated to the status of a Law of Nature as yet. Regardless, it would be rather remarkable if such complex systems that have governed our universe have been put in place through pure chance. Indeed, the prevailing thinking among scientists is that the Laws of Nature that have determined the fate of our universe, with all its attributes, must have been in place, imbedded within the primordial singularity and are thus eternal.
Just as the universe was born in the suddenness of a de novo unleashed energy and matter, closer to home, our solar system was also born in the raging death throes of a supernova explosion of its primordial star, the Tiamat. It was in the Tiamat that powerful nuclear reactions forged life sustaining elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus that were eventually gifted to our sun and planets.
Early on, some 4 billion years ago, in the still highly turbulent and with unimaginable energies suffused planet Earth, surrounded initially by a methane atmosphere and under the blazing and by perpetual lightning incandescent sky, union of hydrogen and carbon resulted in the formation of a molecule capable of replication. A new entity, called Life, thus emerged in the form of the first prokaryotic (without a nucleus) mono-cellular organism, our most ancient ancestor, named Aries by the cosmologist Brian Swimme. It was the process of epigenetic mutations that led to a succession of ever more sophisticated organisms capable of survival in the highly hostile environment of the nascent Earth. For example, as Aries depleted available nutrients, another prokaryote with photosynthetic ability, aptly named Prometheus, emerged and assured survival of life. Similarly, as hydrogen dependent prokaryotes cleaved hydrogen from water and so released O2 into the atmosphere, a new organism, named Prospero, entered the tempest and was the first to use O2 for its metabolic processes. Then, some 2 billion years later, a new era of mitotic replication began with the appearance of the first eukaryotic (with nucleus) organism, the Vikengla. It was Vikengla’s descendants the proto-sperm Tristan and the proto-ovum Isolde, like primordial lovers that they were, who united into the first multi-cellular organism, named Argos, from which all subsequent life, flora, fauna and humanity derived. This remarkable ability of life to sustain itself, in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles continuously placed in its path over billions of years, may be rooted in the principle of Autopoeisis, or self-creation, that all things in the universe possess inherent tendencies toward fulfillment of their potential. Translated into biology this axiom supposes that epigenetic mutations occurred as a means of supporting the development of a given species. Darwin’s theory of natural selection of survivable traits is consonant with this concept. It can be argued therefore that gene transforming processes, that have served the survivability of life over the past four billion years, ultimately became genetically imbedded as the Will to Live.
In 2003 there was a report in the Science magazine of a new gene, the so called HTT gene that in its long allele form is responsible for happiness in general, possibly resulting in the optimistic Will to Live. Patients with suicidal tendencies, on the other hand, were harboring only the short allele form of this gene that normally serves in the transmission of serotonin, a.k.a. the “happy hormone”, from one brain cell to the other. In another study of more than one thousand patients with suicidal ideas and with equal number of controls, the genome profile showed that patients with suicidal tendencies had an over-expression of the ACP 1 gene on chromosome 2. Clearly, such studies, while useful in the search for an effective treatment of depression, are also an en passant evidence that human genome is likely endowed with genes that can influence happiness and thus optimistic outlook on life, including the Will to Live.
Final Thoughts
It is with these thoughts in mind that it is not unreasonable to ask whether the Will to Live is yet another Law of Nature. I believe it is, for it fulfills the necessary criteria in this regard: it is universal, it is absolute regardless of circumstances, it has been timeless since life was conceived and it will hopefully be reproducible in the eyes of future observers. Still, the question as to Who or What ordained all the Laws of Nature to begin with, remains a mystery, a mystery that we can only answer in the solitude of our souls and in light of our intimacy with science and faith.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, as I beg forgiveness for asking you to leave the comfort of your homes on this wintry night to listen to this Story of Life and Human Immortality, and remembering Voltaire’s admonishment that “the secret of a boring speech is the art of saying everything”, I shall conclude by quoting Albert Schweitzer who discussing his essay on “The Ethics of Reverence for Life” said: “The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness is the assertion I am life that Wills to Live in the midst of life that Wills to Live”.
Bibliography
Caspi, Avshalom et al.: Influence of Life Stress on Depression, Moderation by a Polymorphism in the HTTP gene. Science: 301, 386-389, 2003
Chesterton, G.K.: St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dumb Ox. Random House Publishers, 1974
Davies, Paul: The Mind of God. Touchstone Publishers, 1993
Durant, Will: The History of Civilization. Simon and Schuster Publishers, 1954
Durant, Will: The Story of Philosophy. Simon and Schuster Publishers, 1961
Freud, Sigmund: The Ego and the Id. W.W. Norton and Company Publishers, 1960
Green, Brian: The Elegant Universe. Random House Publishers, 2000
Hawking, Stephen: A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books Publishers, 1988
Lederman, Leon: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? Dell Publishers, 1993
Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco: Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1980
Schopenhauer, Arthur: The World as Will and Idea. Everyman Publishers, 1995
Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas: The Universe Story. Harper and Collins Publishers, 1993
Willour, V.L. et al: A Genome-wide Association Study of Attempted Suicide. Molecular Psychiatry: March, 2011
Notes
All About Philosophy: Does God Exist? (Google Search)
All About Science: Big Bang Theory – An Overview (Google Search)
Das, S.: The Upanishads (Google Search)
Do Amarial J.R. and Oliveria J.M.: The Limbic System
Hoerr, Winfried: The Final Belief System (Google Search)
Malaybasu.windpress.com: Schweitzer’s Will to Live and Darwin’s First Principle (Google Search)
Schweitzer, Albert: The Ethics of Reverence for Life (Google Search)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Bacon, Bergson, Aristotle, Kant including Critique of Pure Reason, Nietzsche,
Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer
The Old Testament: Book of Daniel, Chapter 13: Susana and the Elders
The Old Testament: Genesis
Wilson, John: Evolution and Philosophy (Google Search)
Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia (Google Search):
Darwin: On the Origin of Species, Deductive Reasoning, Freud,
Median Forebrain Bundle, Metaphysics, Noumena, Hindu Cycle of Life,
Upanishads
Big bang, Black Holes, Electro-magnetic force, Einstein’s Theories, Expansion
Of Universe, Newton’s Theory of Gravity, Second Law of Thermodynamics,
Time Line of Scientific Discoveries, Quantum Physics, Quantum Gravity
Theories, Uncertainty Principle