Sarat's Pad, Home of PANTHER (just call me Schroedinger's otter)

There are persons, it seems, who worrit painfully over whether the universe has a purpose, whether life has a purpose, how 'cold' and 'mechanistic' is science to say the universe will come to an end and that's that.  I really shouldn't worry about it, guys, it won't be in your time. 

They could consider the lilies of the field of course, which toil not neither do they spin, and yet your heavenly  Father feedeth them.  Not Solomon in all his glory, etc. 

'What is the point of this, what is it for?' may be sensible questions with obvious answers.  What is the point of going to the supermarket?  I need to eat.  What is the point of filling in some ridiculous form? Scrap it or denounce the idiot who devised it.  'What am I for?' is not a question I can get the hang of.  Perhaps it comes from a need to be needed, a need to be defined by the external world, draw one's sense of who one is from it. Of what, whose purpose am I an agent? 

'What am I for' is potentially a rather nasty question, carrying the implication that I may not choose my own purpose, should I wish to have one, my purpose has been allocated to me, and I am but the humble instrument thereof.  There may be some rather severe questions of ontology here.  Why does existence require justification?  Why is its fact not sufficient in itself?  Why  does the universe have to justify its existence? 

I am.  The meaning of my existence is to be.  Should I elect to attribute to myself a purpose, then that purpose is to be all I can be.  Why should I be for anything?  Here I sit on the third rock from the sun, part of something huge and fascinating called the universe, huge and fascinating equally to the most rigid materialist and the dreamiest mystic.  If you are not interested in anything, then I guess you are basically in that condition known as clinical depression and you need to feel 'for' something to galvanize you into normal function.  If your life is shitty, you may wonder what the point of it is and being told that the shittiness is God's will against which you may not revolt may if you are sufficiently brain-washed make you content with it.  There are of course two kinds of shittiness.  One is how you feel about things, which is entirely under your control, and the actions of others which are outside your control, unless you join with others to form the Labour Party, or something.

Even in conditions of the grossest poverty or tyranny, when there are only disease, starvation, torture and death in sight, people do not en masse commit suicide.  Is this more than societal taboo or fear of hell? 

Ah, the famous lemmings.  Lemmings are just not very bright.  They can swim. When they reach water when migrating,they jump in, regardless of whether there is an opposite shore.  As I have just noted the life of the penguin can be pretty grim.  Now, I do not know how penguins express contentment, as cats roll over and purr, but I do not think  penguins in a blizzard huddled together for indeed dear life are penguins brimming over with the joy of existence.  Nor do I think they fear eternal damnation.  Why don't they just give up?

I think the energy, the Light, the life-force, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower', the imperative is experienced by all life-forms as a prime directive: survive!   

There are many stories, some better documented than others, of grief, mourning and remembrance in non-human animals following the loss of a mate or an owner, one of the most famous of which is Greyfriars Bobby. 

To say that non-human animals have no self-awareness and so no concept of death is a tricksy one.  To say they commit suicide would not seem right, denoting a conscious choosing of death.  I should suspect that anyone who has had a pet close to the end of its life would agree that the animal has an awareness of er, something.  It would seem to me that without an imperative that continuing to live is the way to go prey animals would happily let themselves be eaten.  To surrender the urge to live, to give up, to not care about the oncoming bus, is not to consciously choose death, and I should think stories such as that of the grieving cat that ran under a car come into that category.  Caution, you may find the next bit disturbing if you have a mechanistic view of non-human life.  There is nothing in the loss of an owner or mate that necessarily threatens the continued existence of an animal. It would seem that non-human animals pack it in for the same reason as human animals, psychological pain, and like human animals do not give in to physical misery.

A Skye terrier sat on his master's grave for fourteen years.  What does it mean? 

Oh, and how does it relate to 'the selfish gene', of course.  Animals that give up upon the loss of significant other are not demonstrating altruism for the good of themselves, their young, their species.  I suppose one might argue that, from the point of view of their genes, they're failures. 

Are there then in non-human just as in human animals conflicting directives?  The polarities governing humans are form and essence, love and fear, self and other, reality and illusion. Chimps recoil at a stick shaped like a snake.  I think we can say chimps haven't grokked form and essence and the libraries are not filled with books by tigers on reality and illusion, but the other two - I think so.

What one might call the polar bear theory of evolution holds that if it's bloody cold and your fur is denser than that of the bear on the neighbouring ice-floe you have a better chance of survival.  A few aeons later polar bears have very dense fur - unless the climate has inconveniently warmed up in sync - in geological time.  Sudden - in evolutionary/geological terms - global warming is not a nice thing to do to an animal with very dense fur.  Of course life is adapted to its environments.  It wouldn't be around if it didn't.  Suppose you dump  plants requiring lots of water in arid conditions.  Bye-bye, plants.  If, however, you dump  plants that only need a very little more water than the amount available, those among them that require least water do have a chance of survival.  I don't see how the mating-habits of the praying mantis fit in, but they're hardly a perfect example of the beauty and harmony of God's creation.  Whichever perspective one adopts, it is hard to see why some animals feed on live prey.  Why can't they feed on dead prey, like the rest of us?  Either the 'Creator' is a remarkably sick individual or what is the benefit, how would this have turned out to be the way to go?

What is a polar bear 'for'?  That's a different question from what does it do?  One could say what it does is regulate the seal population.  To say it is for something is to say it has been allocated a purpose, either by 'God' or by humans.  The human fixation on allocating purpose or lack of has led equally to the extinction of some species and population explosions in others.   

The business of a polar bear is one it can hardly avoid: to be polar bearish, to get on with being a polar bear.  The business of humans is to get on with being human, which brings us back to one of those guys whose names begin with A, Aristotle, Anselm, Augustine, I never can remember which, who said evil is itself nothing, evil is illusion, evil is humans being what they are not, not what they are, the clamouring of the false self that thinks itself centre of the universe.  A more pragmatic description would be that the business of humans is to get on with being fit for the company of other humans.   Is that not to say any one individual has been allocated a purpose?  Yes and no: also he or she allocates.  The key is reciprocity, mutuality.  The human allocated the purpose of conforming to the supposed will of God does not allocate to God the purpose of obedience to her commands.