Why Are We Born?

The last day of Pompeii, by Karl Bryullov

Why are we born? We are born because our parents procreated. In theory, there would not be much more to say. I could end this essay here, but no. I will keep writing, because, since I did not exist before my conception and therefore I was born without being able to be consulted, I feel I have the right to judge life now that I am old. And it doesn't matter that my situation is not among the worst faced by sentient beings throughout natural history, the right still exists. I mean, the sacred duty to evaluate things, which we all have and practice all the time, even those who believe they refrain from making judgments.

My parents were also brought into the world in the same way, without being able to be consulted, and in situations much worse than mine. My mother was born in a small town in the northeast of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, right next to the state of Bahia, to parents from the interior of Bahia, in the late 1950s. She was raised in the interior of Bahia and later moved to the city of Salvador, where she would end up meeting my father, who lived there at the beginning of his career. My father was born in São Paulo in the mid-1950s, the son of a Greek mother and a Polish father who had arrived in Brazil the previous year, fleeing the poverty and oppression caused by civil conflicts and dictatorships in post-World War II Europe.

One different detail before my birth or before the birth of my parents and we would never have existed. If a certain Austrian tyrant had managed to enter Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, my paternal grandparents would not have met, my father would not have been born and neither would I. Our existence depends even on the exact moment in which conception occurs, since seconds later would imply a different genetic profile, which means that we would be different people. Seneca wrote the following in one of his letters to Lucilius:

Chance has a great deal of power in our lives—necessarily so, since it is by chance that we are alive.

When Seneca speaks of “chance” here, he is not speaking of a universe ruled by indeterminism, nor of the total freedom of agents — after all, Seneca, like any other Stoic philosopher, was a determinist. Chance here just means something that could not be foreseen with any accuracy; it means uncertainty, whether of a greater or lesser degree. It is in the midst of uncertainty that our actions contribute to whatever has been determined by previous causes coming to pass. However, regardless of whether or not we accept Stoicism with respect to determinism, there are things we can be absolutely certain of. I will talk about them shortly.

It is strange to think that if there had been a slight difference in past events, none of us would be here. The nonexistent Venusians and Jovians were the lucky ones, their planets were incapable of sustaining life. Ours was just the right size, the right distance from the Sun, and had the right chemical compounds for life to emerge, which sprouted here and unfortunately never stopped multiplying. Given that we are alive because of chance, all we can do is put up with existence as it is or lament it.

Lamenting doesn't do much good, I admit. But you'd be wrong if you thought that only pessimists lament their existence. A considerable portion of humans throughout our brief history on Earth have lamented their condition. Even many of those who advocated the preservation of the human species and our expansion to the stars have lamented their share, to some extent. After all, if most of us had been truly content from the beginning, we would never have left the savannah tens of thousands of years ago. We were so dissatisfied with our lives that we spread to every continent in prehistoric times.

Just living has never been enough for humans. We have consciousness to thank for this. Consciousness, which is our curse, is also the result of natural chance. For 165 million years, dinosaurs reigned at the top of the planet's food chain. However, 66 million years ago, an asteroid measuring over 10 kilometers in diameter collided with the Earth, extinguishing most species, especially large animals, those that needed more nutrients to survive. This made room for our small mammalian ancestors to develop and rule the world.

At a certain point, one of these species began to wake up from the eternal present in which the other animals, our brothers, inhabit. It was the awakening of human consciousness that cursed the species with lucidity. Natural selection chose individuals who were increasingly self-aware, aware of the past, present and future. That was our birth, in a collective sense. There isn't much mystery, even though we don't understand some of the details. From the chance of abiogenesis happening, to the chance of the various mass extinctions that allowed the emergence of new sentient beings occurring, humans being some of these sentient beings. And here we are, in this pit, thanks to chances that in reality were determined by previous causes. Fated chances. 

§

No matter what we do, though, this state of affairs in which we find ourselves won't last. The day will come when we will go the way of the fossils that we exhibit in museums. Because of our inability to predict everything precisely, we don't have many certainties, it is true. However, one of the certainties we can have in this existence is that all perishable things will one day perish. It may be difficult to say exactly how or when, but they'll perish, and no chance will make them imperishable, no chance will turn us into immortal gods. By all appearances, the universe itself will perish in the distant future, thanks to entropy.

It may not seem like it, but I used to go to church at one point in my life. In my case, the Catholic Church. I never liked singing, so I would stay quiet during the times when the congregation sang at mass, which weren't that many, thank God. But I remember a song I used to listen to in church whose chorus went: “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but your word will not pass away.” The lyrics come from Matthew 24:35, a biblical verse in which Jesus says exactly that about his teachings.

However his word will pass away. Our grandchildren's grandchildren will one day die. The human race will cease to exist, one way or another, as will every other species of living being. At some point in the future, all life will cease to exist in this oasis of suffering that we call Earth, an oasis that lies in the middle of infinite and sterile space. Of course, universal and necessary truths, if they exist at all, will continue to be true. In this sense, and only in this sense, we can say that certain things will never cease to exist, even when the last star in the universe has gone out.

Necessary and universal truths, such as that a triangle has three sides, or that existence hurts all sentient beings, while non-existence hurts no one. But one day, when the human race ceases to exist, there will be no one to know these truths. Unless, somewhere in the cosmos, another species of sentient beings emerges that are complex enough to be able to understand the world around them and seek answers to everything, just as we have done. But even these possible beings will die and cease to exist, leaving only silence behind.

But will take a long time for this final silence to arrive, if it indeed will be the end of everything and not just the prelude to a new beginning. Before it comes, there will be more than enough time for an almost unimaginable amount of suffering. As long as there are sentient beings, as long as they do not all perish in a final universal extinction, there will be pain, at least of some kind. And as long as there is at least one being that is not only sentient but also conscious, there will be an understanding of pain. In Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer wrote the following:

If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that the infinite pain, which everywhere abounds in the world and springs from the want and misery essential to life, could be purposeless and purely accidental. Our susceptibility to pain is well nigh infinite; but that to pleasure has narrow limits. It is true that each separate piece of misfortune seems to be an exception, but misfortune in general is the rule.

Why are we born, then? We are born to suffer. This is another certainty of the world of becoming, the physical world. In it, there is no stability. The only rule is the eternal change from one state to another. Every beginning implies an end, and every process of change occurs through suffering, to the misfortune of sentient creatures. Hence the preference for the vegetable or, better still, the mineral, expressed by some thinkers considered to be more somber. But they are not somber out of mere personal taste, they are so because they are too lucid. It is lucidity that brings the horror of reality or of destiny, the horror fati, a term coined by Julio Cabrera to oppose Nietzsche's amor fati.

It is not every day that we discover we are part of a great cosmic horror story. In this story, we are puppets of an invisible force that permeates everything, a brutal and ironic entity that laughs at the plans of men and their fantasies. The worst of all is that we have no possibility of escaping it. The only way to not participate in the great and horrifying epic of existence is not to be generated and brought into the world, something that is beyond the reach of all those who are already here. We can contribute here and there against the multiplication of the pain, but the greatest consolation of all comes through the knowledge that one day everything will perish, even the cosmos.

At least I hope so.

by Fernando Olszewski