Affirmative societies and the concealment of non-being

[PyramidHead]

Julio Cabrera's book A Critique of Affirmative Morality has finally been translated into English, albeit with some awkwardness. The entire text can be found here. I recommend it in its entirety, but there are sections that deviate from the main theme to discuss the work of other philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, etc. and these parts can be mostly skipped without detracting from the overall impact of the text. Also, there are two handy sections that summarize the foregoing chapters, the first located on p. 129, and the second on p. 235. Skip to there for a high-level overview of his thesis.

For now, I want to focus on what he has to say about affirmative societies, or societies organized around affirmative morality. In brief, affirmative morality is any system of ethics that deals with how to live in the world, while taking the existence of the world and the structure of living itself as "given" and exempting them from consideration. One analogy that Cabrera uses to make this distinction is the rules of war, which provide guidance to combatants and states about how to do battle or take prisoners, but say nothing about the issue of war itself. Or, how there are complicated regulations concerning how to humanely execute someone, but they do not include the question of whether execution can itself be considered humane. In this sense, affirmative ethical systems are "second-degree" systems, situated in the context of an encompassing structure that itself is never evaluated ethically. By this definition, nearly all moral theories are affirmative ones. To Cabrera, the affirmative mind is one that not only says 'yes' to the ontological form of being-in-the-world (postponing or concealing a critical examination of its nature), but provides a 'firming' or 'firmament' upon which to anchor psychological security. He then goes on to describe this mindset at a societal level (bolding mine):

The negative interpretation of non-being (of dying, killing, letting-someone-die, abstaining-from-letting-another-live, letting-another-die, letting-someone-live, and so on) is a crucial component and a key for understanding oblivion and concealment. Societies organized around diverse policies of beings are noteworthy “affirmative” societies where suicide and abstention from procreating are ethically condemned. Every attempt of ethical defense of these forms of non-being is stigmatized as pathological, irrational, subjective or socially disturbing. The incessant battle against the supposed “nihilism” of these attitudes, from the part of medical, religious, juridical and philosophical flanks, can be seen as an attempt to transform the non-being of being into an external “danger” that can be avoided through procedures, an incessant movement that transforms the non-being of being into something that “comes after” the being, as something that could have been avoided some way.

Affirmative societies interpret as “nihilist” any attempt to give the non-being a positive interpretation. It prefers to give it a moral sense that currently determines non-being as being some kind of “evil”. The “presence of evil in the world”, one of the premises of theodicy, is supported on a purely negative interpretation of non-being, in contrast with the being, seen as non-problematically affirmative, where non-being seems indefinitely “postponed”. Affirmative ethics lives under the expenses of the presence of “evil” in the world, and prefers not taking notice of the non-being of being (or maybe the policy of beings prepares a polite pretending “not taking notice”) even when this attitude leads to extreme points as of the Kantian ethics affirming there has never been in the world one single moral action, or as of the Christian ethics in general, declaring every man is a sinner. Not even when “evil” fills the world and occupies the totality of spaces, affirmative conceptual organization of society accepts thinking about the possibility that non-being admits a positive interpretation, as a structural part of being, instead of considering it as a foreign negativity or a passing anomaly.

To that, affirmative ethics corresponds, by force, an affirmative ontology. The basic postulates of this ontology are assertions such as: “being is better than not-being”, “being more is better than being less”, and so on. Usual completely basic ethical assertions can be derived from this, such as: “the being is good; the non-being is bad”; “being bad is better than not being anything at all”, and so on. There is, within this affirmative ontology, a systematic favoring of being against non-being, and also a kind of ontological-ethical “maximalism” (“The more being, the better”). The incongruence of affirmative societies seems to consist of the simultaneity of the basic belief in the goodness of being (and in the “evilness” of non-being) with the regular mechanisms of concealment of this being. How is it understood that something basically “good” must stay hidden and forgotten?

To make sense of this, it helps to keep in mind that Cabrera's preceding investigation of ontology concludes with the claim that death (or non-existence), rather than being a punctual event that interrupts life, is a constitutive part of life from the very beginning. We are all born dying, and this terminality is a basic feature of life, coming into play the moment it starts, not an incidental occurrence. This is what he means by the "non-being of being", and what he contends is deliberately or unconsciously hidden by affirmative thought, which must simultaneously hold that being is good and that non-being, something inexorably tied to being in its very fabric, is bad.

The other aspect of life's structure that is systematically downplayed in affirmative ethics is the inevitability of conflict. Although a fundamental principle common to almost every kind of morality is to respect the interests of others, it is never investigated whether simply existing alongside others in a world where resources (space, time, energy) are limited is an activity conducive to fulfilling this principle. If we acknowledge that every person's life contains the violation of other people's autonomy and interference with their goals, not out of intentional malice but just due to the chaos of our interactions, then we are already "morally disqualified" according to Cabrera. The denial of this fact manifests itself socially as well:

The affirmative concern on how-to-live (or the overwhelming concern of living, of finding, in any way and against any one, a way to be, to plant your own “right to live” in the middle of the world) drastically assumes that, in order to say yes to life, it is necessary not to consider the other's life as absolutely inviolable. Considering the other's life as inviolable is something that, given the conflictive structure of the world – as elucidated by naturalized ontology - can only be done if we are willing to put our own lives at disposal, an attitude strongly contested in current affirmative thinking based on pride and hetero-aggressiveness. At most, affirmative ethics encourages dying in the full exercise of killing (in war, for example). This way, the how-to-live assumes total primacy over the what-to-live, and the how-to-live can only develop at the expenses of breaking the principle of inviolability of the other's life, to the extent that the ethics of how-to-live only conceives the respect for the other through strict qualifications [...]

From there on, aggressiveness is admitted and administrated intra-worldly by the organized affirmative societies, creating a “politicized ethics”, in the sense of a fair distribution of violence, a typical piece of secondary morality since violence has been accepted in the radical level. Affirmative societies accept as morally correct, for example, the implantation of capital punishment and, in general, the extermination of people who are considered pernicious to society, struggling against all forms of what is narrow-mindedly seen as “self-destructive” (suicide, drinking, drugs and excessive exuberant hedonist forms of life in general), admitting the existence of “fair wars” undertaken by nations against “dangerous enemies”, and accepting competence and struggle as forms of social interactions par excellence, propitiating the struggle for “gaining favors”, where the less malicious are massacred by the more “intelligent”, quick and opportunist in a commerce where one should not allow oneself “to be taken as a fool”. Institutionalized violence is, at the same time, concealed in legislation, public morality, institutions and public freedoms, apparently “at everyone's reach.” [...]

Furthermore, affirmative ethics, founded on a primacy of being over non-being rather than a conception of equality among all beings, is prone to assign people value based on group membership, an easy behavior that we evolved to do almost reflexively.

From the disregard of human life for not being Athenian to the disregard of human life for not being pro-democracy, there are certainly differences, however not in the radical level of respect for human life simply for being human: from this point of view, Greeks, as much as Moderns, got out of the scope of a first degree morality; because, in spite of expressive changes from ancient to modern ethics, the affirmative characteristic of these theories has always been maintained. The justification of “self-defense” is fragile in the radical level: the “barbarians” threatened the Athenians as the Muslims threaten Western world nowadays. In both cases, we grant the right of killing “those who threaten us” (free citizens or occidentals). Modern affirmative societies, that allege to have overcome the partial (not universal) morality of the Greeks, are the same that totally agree with bombing the military bases of Saddam Hussein where many people die. There may be, I do not deny it, rational arguments to make important differences between ancient and modern ethics in this problematic context, but one cannot say we have overcome the Greeks by introducing the requirement of universality regarding the issue of respect for human life simply for being human. This is basically impossible for an affirmative ethics. [...]

The problem, when getting out of the calm and simplicity of first degree morality, is that, suddenly, humans are in the possession of mortal weapons of difficult handling: the possibility of determining that certain humans have stopped being humans and are, therefore, eliminable, and also the always open possibility of killing in “legitimate self-defense”. Both things are diffuse, even though Hitler and other treacherous homicides are easy and rhetorical examples always at hand. The majority of cases, the common aggressions of everyday life, are not as easy to decide as the so-called “great crimes of humanity”. What should we do in order “to stop being human” and become, therefore, “eliminable”? Kill? Which way? How many? How often? Which attitude? And, on the other hand, what does “self-defense” really mean? What are the limits between self-defense and aggression (and, therefore, between “expansive wars” and “merely defensive wars”)? When they are asked about, all nations at war declare they are only “defending themselves” (not too different from the men involved in a bar quarrel). Is there not the saying, in war and in joke, “the best defense is attack”? Offensive and defensive actions are intermixed in an inseparable way. In referring to “being Athenian”, there is indeed a rational difference in favor of “being for the democratic forces”, but the qualification of some human beings as “enemies” and, therefore, eliminable, is identical in the Peloponnesian war and in the Gulf War. Affirmative societies, in a clear way, rationally justify the qualification of certain humans as being “eliminable”, and this should be fully assumed. Human life as such is not inviolable in affirmative societies, and this must be systematically remembered in the context of moral condemnations of suicide and other human attitudes, as one of the greatest evaluative inconsistencies of affirmativeness.

There is so much more to say, but this post is getting long and I think I've conveyed his general idea. Cabrera is an Argentine philosopher living in Brazil and writing in Spanish; as such, his contributions are scarcely noticed by European and American philosophers. I think his analysis of the "affirmative" is unique in a way that separates it from the ordinary pessimism of people like Schopenhauer. He isn't gloomy, in other words, but neutral and uncompromising. In the domain of non-analytic philosophy there is so much fluff that it's refreshing to find someone willing to give existential concerns a properly rigorous treatment. Or maybe I'm just biased, and he's full of shit. What do you think?

 

[untermensche]

The negative interpretation of non-being

If I say I will take your vision will you be happy?

If I take your hearing will you be happy?

If I take your ability to move around will you be happy?

If I take your memory and all your understandings and knowledge will you be happy?

How does the thought of losing it all make a person happy?

 

[PyramidHead]

The negative interpretation of non-being

If I say I will take your vision will you be happy?

If I take your hearing will you be happy?

If I take your ability to move around will you be happy?

If I take your memory and all your understandings and knowledge will you be happy?

How does the thought of losing it all make a person happy?

It doesn't. The point is that "losing it all" is not an external threat that may or may not happen, something that disrupts the ordinary nature of things; we are all constantly losing it all from the very first moment of life. Death is not just punctual (an event that takes place on a certain date) but structural, operating at all times as a continuous vacating, decaying, and dwindling. So, according to Cabrera, and I agree with him, being and non-being must be evaluated together:

Blog

[...]it is therefore absurd to say that being born (having emerged) is good but having to die is bad, because death came along with the being so inseparable and constitutive, not as a passing event, but in its own structure. Being born is being placed on the mortality of being, so that if death is, for some reason, considered bad, then having emerged should also be bad, or both things should be good (or, as the agnostic claims, neither good nor bad), but in no case it could be argued some asymmetry in favor of one side or the other. Regretting having to die should be structurally identical to regretting being born, because it is not in our power to be born in a non-mortal way.

 

[untermensche]

...it is therefore absurd to say that being born (having emerged) is good but having to die is bad...

Yes it is.

It is good to have vision.

Bad to lose it.

 

[PyramidHead]

...it is therefore absurd to say that being born (having emerged) is good but having to die is bad...

Yes it is.

It is good to have vision.

Bad to lose it.

Sure, that's a legitimate evaluation to make, but it's at the level of intra-worldly goods, making it a second-degree evaluation. It says nothing about the first-degree question of life itself or its nature.

No empirical weighing of intra-worldly positives and negatives can amount to an ontological evaluation of being in a structural sense.

In the same way, you can say: it is good to win wars, bad to lose them. Good to humanely execute prisoners, bad to do it in a messy way. Those statements say nothing about whether it is good to have wars at all, or to execute people at all, respectively.

 

[untermensche]

Yes it is.

It is good to have vision.

Bad to lose it.

Sure, that's a legitimate evaluation to make, but it's at the level of intra-worldly goods, making it a second-degree evaluation. It says nothing about the first-degree question of life itself or its nature.

Is it better to exist or to not exist?

That all depends on the state one is existing in.

If you are in daily pain and every waking moment is torture it is probably better to not exist.

 

[PyramidHead]

Sure, that's a legitimate evaluation to make, but it's at the level of intra-worldly goods, making it a second-degree evaluation. It says nothing about the first-degree question of life itself or its nature.

Is it better to exist or to not exist?

That all depends on the state one is existing in.

If you are in daily pain and every waking moment is torture it is probably better to not exist.

That's still at the level of the see-saw of goods and bads that may befall a person. Some people may live in constant pain but still find enjoyment in life, some people may have all the money in the world but kill themselves over a lost love. To critically evaluate whether existence or nonexistence is best, we should restrict our analysis to the things that are common to all lives, not just the bad ones or the good ones.

And we should make a distinction between two types of nonexistence: stopping-oneself-from-further-existence (suicide) and not-having-existed (never being born). People may have all kinds of reasons to prefer continued existence over interrupted existence, but we cannot say the same about those who are never born.

Cabrera observes that all lives have things in common--structural, formal features independent of their content--that flip the usual affirmative story about suicide and childbirth. In affirmative societies, suicide is discouraged per se, by definition a sign of mental illness, and unless there is a serious resource crisis childbirth is encouraged and rewarded. According to a "negative" ethics that does not assume the sacredness of life as a given, immune from all interrogation, suicide can be a moral act if performed to remove oneself from a situation that requires harming others or being seriously harmed. Procreation is always a manipulative act, using another person for one's own ends (to save a marriage, give your life purpose, provide for you when you're old and sick), never done for the benefit of the person being manipulated. There are other aspects to birth that make it a morally problematic act, but I don't have time at the moment to get into them, and I'm not sure you're interested in hearing them anyway.

 

[untermensche]

There is no such thing as just "existence".

There is only existence in a certain state with certain capabilities.

So it is impossible to just talk about this thing called "existence".

It does not exist.

 

[rousseau]

Interesting thoughts. Sounds like the direction some of the world's more actualized countries are heading, e.g. those starting to allow people to terminate their own life.

All in all, the philosophy sounds like it's a bit ahead of it's time and something that will inevitably start seeping into our world eventually.

 

[PyramidHead]

There is no such thing as just "existence".

There is only existence in a certain state with certain capabilities.

So it is impossible to just talk about this thing called "existence".

It does not exist.

That may be true if we're talking about the bare existence of a suitcase or a piece of lint. But with human existence, there is no easy dismissal of the structural element.

Some of the features Cabrera attributes to human existence as such, regardless of one's state, are as follows.

We are all in a constant state of 'dying', apart from the punctual date and time when death actually occurs.

The naturalized ontology only describes the direction of nature in terms of its raw and trivial sensible-natural mode of being. The being wears out and gets worn out, breaks, wrinkles, passes, decreases, withers, gets older, steals, limits, evacuates, gives up, cracks. The results of that naturalized ontology are certainly not “interesting”, but they are, so to speak, the most trivial, something that cannot be made subtle in an “intelligent” way, but only boringly repeated.

This is just his way of saying we are all subject to injury and disease, and even if we manage to avoid those, our health is always declining unless we regularly intervene.

Secondly, we are all vulnerable to states of extreme physical pain that lead to what Cabrera calls "moral disqualification". Simply put, there is the possibility that at any moment, you could be in a situation so painful that you are no longer a moral being, morality is not expected of you.

There is no ethical theory that can be practiced by a man with hands and feet tied, receiving electrical shocks, not even “stoicism”, even when there might be, for example, some theory for living in Auschwitz but only while one does not come to that extreme point of pain yet. Faced with very intense physical pain, all humans are equal (or, I insist, only different in terms of voltage, as exposes the Great Inquisitor of Orwell's novel), because we are put in a situation where neither subtlety nor humor fit. One's own intense physical pain does not depend on “the attitude taken” because it is pain that determines and makes uniform all the attitudes in the extreme case.

This is important because it highlights that no matter what ethical theories we adopt, there is always within our physiology the potential for their total dissolution into meaninglessness. Thus we can never guarantee that we are fully moral, rational beings, in light of this eventuality.

Moral disqualification also results from the inevitability of conflict between each person's goals in life. It's not that we are naturally immoral, but that something like chaos theory guarantees that I will step on your toes at some point, so to speak. There is no action we can ever take that does not have the potential to harm others, even if we have the best intentions in mind.

This does not mean there is merely pain in the world, but that the world itself “hurts”, the world itself is pain situated in different levels of intensity and commitment. The hurting-of-the-world is visualized, for example, in the necessarily conflictive relations among natural beings imprisoned in a common and forever scarce space, in the regular situation of being-ill, in the evidences of the fragility which constitutes their being-in-the-world, and so on. It seems possible to show the painfulness of the world as such and, at last, its consecutive opening of moral disqualification (a much weaker thesis, no doubt, than the Gnostic thesis of a possible “ethical evilness of the world” or than the thesis of a “radical evil of human nature”). The so called “evil” is an unavoidable result of the fundamental “lack of space” and “lack of time” of the structural human condition, and not of an “intrinsically evil nature” of humans. In the daily and concealing regularity of our lives, we can exercise a certain morality for “times of peace” because we still have time for postponing, for giving ourselves the hope: “tomorrow yes, tomorrow will be different”. When that space is closed (not only in the extreme case of intense physical pain, but in daily life), moral disqualification is automatically produced.

There is never enough space, time and energy for everyone to pursue their individual projects in a way that does not violate the autonomy of others at some point, and in the best case scenario, we still fall victim to moral disqualification in cases of wasting disease, very old age, and other extreme states. In spite of this, we are all basically helpless without each other.

But what about pleasure, happiness, and the joy of living? These, Cabrera claims, can only be rationally interpreted as reactive "intra-wordly" inventions that humans enjoy as a means of distancing themselves from the pain of the world-as-such.

In the ontological-worldly level, the force of the trivial see-saw of ontical “pleasures and pains” is over, the see-saw currently expressed in the vulgar sayings: “After the bad moments, come the good ones”, “Life is a succession of pleasures and pains”, “Tomorrow will be another day”. This symmetry of possibilities finishes in the structural level, because tomorrow will absolutely not be another day but the same day as yesterday, and the same as the day before yesterday and the same as always. The being-towards-death has only one direction, ontology is “one-way”. There is not a death-life direction explainable by naturalized ontology. “Being alive” is a dimension of being-towards-death, as being “healthy” is a dimension of being-towards-illness and “being at peace”, a dimension of being-towards-aggression: they are all of them incidental postponments, small route corrections. Finitude and helplessness are not in oscillation with their contraries, we are not older some day and younger the next; the following day of helplessness is always helplessness. In the ontological level, we can never be “better” or “worse”. The so called “pleasure” is not a part of the structure of the world, but of the postponing strategy of humans.

Finally, the conclusion of all this is a kind of naturalized 'negative' ethics. Again, it's not negative in the sense of saying life is bad, but merely in opposition to the 'affirmative' theories that do not even consider the ontological-structural features of human life-as-such.

Throughout fundamental ontology it is also suggested a manner of passing from “being” to “ought”, from nature to ethical theory, without “naturalist fallacy” (in the sense of G. E. Moore). In the first place, it is shown pain is structural, which means, it forms part of the very natural world. Secondly, it is proved pain, as intense, physical and one's own, can ethically disqualify. From this, it follows that it is ethically good to run away from intense physical pain, and not only “sensibly advantageous”. This at last is a moral rule that has emerged from natural facts. Thus, when it is radically asked if being itself is good, independently from the traditional questions about how to be, or how to be good, now we can answer that being itself is neither good nor bad, but it is possible to show, through a naturalized ontology, that the very being is painful; and, to the extent that the intensity of pain can ethically disqualify, being is in itself ethically disqualifying, independently of how we decide “to be”.

I'm letting Cabrera do the talking because I think he has a unique perspective and a unique way of conveying it, so sorry for the excessive quotes.

 

[untermensche]

That may be true if we're talking about the bare existence of a suitcase or a piece of lint. But with human existence, there is no easy dismissal of the structural element.

Some of the features Cabrera attributes to human existence as such, regardless of one's state, are as follows.

We are all in a constant state of 'dying', apart from the punctual date and time when death actually occurs.

That's a bizarre opinion. We are in the process of living.

Rise and slow decay is what living is about.

"Dying" is not a thing in itself, only living is. We call the absence of life death. All death represents is the absence of something. It is not a thing in itself.

 

[PyramidHead]

That may be true if we're talking about the bare existence of a suitcase or a piece of lint. But with human existence, there is no easy dismissal of the structural element.

Some of the features Cabrera attributes to human existence as such, regardless of one's state, are as follows.

We are all in a constant state of 'dying', apart from the punctual date and time when death actually occurs.

That's a bizarre opinion. We are in the process of living.

Rise and slow decay is what living is about.

Decay is actually quite rapid. It only seems slow due to the constant upkeep we perform without thinking about it. Eating, drinking, working, and sheltering are all things that must be proactively sought after and procured, they do not come with the package. Take away any outside support and the default structure of life becomes quickly apparent; you will be gone in a matter of days.

This also puts the lie to any structural 'rise' in life. All rising is intra-worldly, a result of input and expenditure against the natural grain. It looks to us like a rising because it slows the process of decay somewhat, but it is just an interruption in the general trend.

"Dying" is not a thing in itself, only living is. We call the absence of life death. All death represents is the absence of something. It is not a thing in itself.

Whatever we choose to focus on and examine can be a thing in itself, if only as an object of inquiry. Death is not merely the absence of life: a molecule of carbon dioxide has no life, but we do not say it has died or that it is dead. Death is something that happens to only (and all) living things and, as I said above, is always no more than a week away if we let nature run its course.

 

[PyramidHead]

But the crux of the 'non-being of being' is less about what happens during life, the so-called rising and falling, which may be different for different people. Rather, it is a logical outcome of the necessity of death, both as a punctual event and a simple consequence of thermodynamics. Impermanence itself is built into life, not as a prediction of some event that may or may not happen, but something constitutive that always breaks things down unless we intervene.

 

[untermensche]

That's a bizarre opinion. We are in the process of living.

Rise and slow decay is what living is about.

Decay is actually quite rapid. It only seems slow due to the constant upkeep we perform without thinking about it. Eating, drinking, working, and sheltering are all things that must be proactively sought after and procured, they do not come with the package. Take away any outside support and the default structure of life becomes quickly apparent; you will be gone in a matter of days.

This also puts the lie to any structural 'rise' in life. All rising is intra-worldly, a result of input and expenditure against the natural grain. It looks to us like a rising because it slows the process of decay somewhat, but it is just an interruption in the general trend.

The decay of what?

There are people in their 80's doing the Ironman triathlon.

The mind can expand for a long time. People in their 50's go to Medical school.

Yes life requires food and drink which humans have made for many incredibly easy. It does not require any more effort than going to the store. No predators usually get in your way.

Life is what it is. It is a slow rise for humans. It takes years to reach maturity. Then there is a long period of stability, a period of slow decline and at the end a rapid decline.

Saying it is all or mostly decline is absurd.

You can't reach good conclusions if you start with an absurd premise.

Death is not merely the absence of life: a molecule of carbon dioxide has no life, but we do not say it has died or that it is dead. Death is something that happens to only (and all) living things and, as I said above, is always no more than a week away if we let nature run its course.

We only say that living things have died. And all it means is it is not alive anymore.

The term "death" is a term of negation. It means the negation of life. It is a negation of something that exists. Not something with existence itself.

 

[PyramidHead]

Decay is actually quite rapid. It only seems slow due to the constant upkeep we perform without thinking about it. Eating, drinking, working, and sheltering are all things that must be proactively sought after and procured, they do not come with the package. Take away any outside support and the default structure of life becomes quickly apparent; you will be gone in a matter of days.

This also puts the lie to any structural 'rise' in life. All rising is intra-worldly, a result of input and expenditure against the natural grain. It looks to us like a rising because it slows the process of decay somewhat, but it is just an interruption in the general trend.

The decay of what?

There are people in their 80's doing the Ironman triathlon.

The mind can expand for a long time. People in their 50's go to Medical school.

None of which is a counterexample to anything I wrote. Do you think I'm unaware that people go to school and run marathons? The point is that these are the results of intentional action, not things that are part of the structure of being. The question that is being put is: what can be said about human life independently of whether someone decides to study medicine or take part in a race?

Yes life requires food and drink which humans have made for many incredibly easy. It does not require any more effort than going to the store. No predators usually get in your way.

These are remarks that skim along the surface of my claim without really refuting it. I never said anything about the degree of effort required to maintain life; I simply acknowledged the fact that life needs constant maintenance. The reality that vast and complicated systems of food growth, preparation, and storage are all required in order to sustain human existence simply proves that human existence is ever vulnerable to running out of steam, inherently declining and fading unless we prop it up through inventive strategies.

Life is what it is. It is a slow rise for humans. It takes years to reach maturity. Then there is a long period of stability, a period of slow decline and at the end a rapid decline.

Saying it is all or mostly decline is absurd.

You are mistaking content for structure, form for essence. Cabrera is careful to say that he is not making empirical statements about the average human life, something that could change with statistics. What you are talking about is what happens within a life, just as generals talk about what happens within a war: there are skirmishes, periods of stasis and planning, explosive battles, and hopefully victory. But war, as with life, must not only be evaluated on those grounds. A general is not interested in the fact that war is inherently violent and destructive. He only wants to win. A radical analysis that goes beyond what is a "good war" (or a "good life") reveals the nature of all wars, regardless of how they may be waged.

You can't reach good conclusions if you start with an absurd premise.

You have yet to address the actual premise.

 

[untermensche]

None of which is a counterexample to anything I wrote. Do you think I'm unaware that people go to school and run marathons? The point is that these are the results of intentional action, not things that are part of the structure of being. The question that is being put is: what can be said about human life independently of whether someone decides to study medicine or take part in a race?

There is no such thing as a "structure of being".

There is only being in a certain state with certain capacities.

No two humans exist in the same state. While most have similar capacities.

I simply acknowledged the fact that life needs constant maintenance.

A point that philosophically goes nowhere.

As I said all "being" is in a certain state.

Human life is in such a state that it needs food.

End of discussion. Nothing to be made of it.

 

[PyramidHead]

Seems like you were right, rousseau.

 

[bigfield]

This also puts the lie to any structural 'rise' in life. All rising is intra-worldly, a result of input and expenditure against the natural grain. It looks to us like a rising because it slows the process of decay somewhat, but it is just an interruption in the general trend.

"Running up the down escalator of entropy."

 

[PyramidHead]

There is no such thing as a "structure of being".

There is only being in a certain state with certain capacities.

No two humans exist in the same state. While most have similar capacities.

I simply acknowledged the fact that life needs constant maintenance.

A point that philosophically goes nowhere.

As I said all "being" is in a certain state.

Human life is in such a state that it needs food.

End of discussion. Nothing to be made of it.

This reply is completely endemic of exactly what Cabrera describes as affirmative thinking.

First, the denial that there is anything to be said about life, being, existence, whatever you want to call it, apart from evaluations of individual states. According to this view, evaluations must never wander outside the fence of the secondary, provincial realm of the intra-world and its mundane concerns. This is exactly analogous to forbidding any discussion of whether hunting wild animals is ethical, and instead focusing on how best to hunt them. The larger structural question (about hunting, or in the present case, about human existence) is ignored, taken as settled, or concealed in favor of remaining situated on the second-degree level.

This is reinforced by the second criticism, that any observation one way or another about the necessary features of life and their ethical implications "philosophically goes nowhere," a criticism that is actually illustrative of the affirmative approach in philosophy, which Cabrera has written extensively about:

All these statements and others that could be made are synthetic trivialities which do not help in anything to increase the “interest” for the world; they are just limited to announce basic truths about our condition, that have a wide influence on moral life. The synthetic triviality of these truths is regularly hidden through the concealment of the affirmative. Precisely, these axioms about the pain of the very establishing of being are systematically concealed in order that affirmative intra-worldly organization of life is possible, since there is no affirmative pondering about these items (and this is precisely, by contrast to monotonous negative thinking, what makes affirmative reflection so “interesting”).

Why does a philosophical point have to "go somewhere"? The point of philosophy is an unbiased examination of the truth, and if the truth is something trivial and uninteresting, that should not sway anyone from pursuing it. Strangely, it seems to sway almost everybody from actually acknowledging that there is even a truth to be found when the topic of conversation is anything that threatens to undermine the affirmative footing reinforced by society.

 

[untermensche]

...According to this view, evaluations must never wander outside the fence of the secondary, provincial realm of the intra-world and its mundane concerns. This is exactly analogous to forbidding any discussion of whether hunting wild animals is ethical, and instead focusing on how best to hunt them. The larger structural question (about hunting, or in the present case, about human existence) is ignored, taken as settled, or concealed in favor of remaining situated on the second-degree level.

In terms of "existence" the only question is: Why something as opposed to nothing?

As far as the temporary arrangements the "stuff" of the universe assumes, that is not a general question about "existence". It is a question about a certain kind of existence.

Humans are a temporary arrangement of "stuff" that has existence. They have temporary capacities and limitations because of it.

But what really "exists" in the human doesn't go anywhere when the human is no longer around.

Why does a philosophical point have to "go somewhere"? The point of philosophy is an unbiased examination of the truth, and if the truth is something trivial and uninteresting, that should not sway anyone from pursuing it. Strangely, it seems to sway almost everybody from actually acknowledging that there is even a truth to be found when the topic of conversation is anything that threatens to undermine the affirmative footing reinforced by society.

Without any handwaving complete the following with something objective and somehow significant.

Humans are such that need food to survive, therefore............

The quote you give talks about dismissing trivialities but you introduce this triviality about food.