I realized tomorrow’s schedule was full, and there would be no time to write. I stared at the city night outside the window for a while, then decided to finish tomorrow’s daily writing tonight.
That morning I had been thinking about “being-towards-death.” Is there an inevitable reverse — a “dying toward life”?
In recent years it has become popular to claim that Darwinian evolution cannot really stand up. I am a theist. I do not think evolution simply does not exist; I think people ignore some important conditions. Humans might have come from nowhere. Earth might be a biological laboratory, and humans might play a role in a larger holistic theory of evolution. What comes next is unclear: perhaps a higher organism replaces us, or perhaps we are destroyed by the artificial intelligence we depend on. The timeline is too short either to prove evolution’s feasibility or to prove God’s existence.
Darwinian evolution has an unavoidable problem. The old paradox runs like this: can an omnipotent being make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? If he can make it, then there is something he cannot lift; if he refuses to make it in order to preserve his authority, then he cannot prove his omnipotence. I have wandered off. The actual problem is the so-called Cambrian explosion. In the Ediacaran period before the Cambrian, the biota maintained a static balance; no research shows that organisms had any food-chain relationship. Then came the Cambrian explosion: by biological classification, most modern phyla appeared in this period. Over the following 25 million years, these organisms radiated rapidly from phyla into many higher forms, and even after five major mass extinctions life still retains its diversity.
In other words, something caused life to evolve with extraordinary complexity and diversity during the Cambrian. Evolutionary theory alone struggles to explain how the quiet Ediacaran creatures — cute, even a little foolish — produced the Cambrian explosion in such a short time. Darwin himself admitted in On the Origin of Species that the case could not yet be explained, and that some people might use it to argue against his evolutionary views. Modern humans can hardly recover the complete truth from fragmented fossils. Perhaps some external, unknowable force added too many “elements” to that strange period and produced a biological explosion.
Of course, the word “evolution” is ambiguous. It should really be called “evolution” in the sense of descent with modification, not progress. Degeneration is also evolution. Evolution does not necessarily mean becoming stronger; it can also mean becoming simpler. The most familiar example is that human embryos have a tail. The information is stored in human genes, but during embryonic development the tail gradually disappears. If it is information, why was it not ultimately retained? There are other regressions: parasites lose their digestive systems, cave creatures lose their eyes. Degeneration is a kind of extinction at the level of evolutionary information; it looks like discarding certain unnecessary functions.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger held that all life is being-towards-death, waiting for the final end. Is the reverse also true — that all death is for the continuation of life?
I once knew a friend who suddenly committed suicide. Years later I learned the real reason: during spiritual practice, he had failed to pass through the “demonic path.” This is hard to understand. It is as if someone keeps whispering in your ear canal, luring you to jump from a high building so that you can obtain everything you want. For a practitioner, that might mean sudden insight into the mysteries of the Dao De Jing, or receiving the same oracle as Laozi. The content of the whisper, whether the promise was fulfilled, and what the person truly wanted — all of it became quiet with the impact of landing. No one knows, and no one wants to know.
Clearly, the meaning of his life was not that final jump. At least his family would not want that ending; such a death offers concrete evidence for calling it “not worth it.” But ask them whether their own lives are worth it, and they become abstract, unable to find any evidence either way. What if we understand death differently? Could it be a beginning or continuation of life in some sense? The person has left our dimension, so no one knows what he experiences after death.
People can only hand the meaning of death to the living, who calculate it as “worth it” or “not worth it.” When a “life” is kept going by a ventilator, with biological instinct as its last vital sign, people judge its value by whether that “life” continues. But if you are the one holding the bill for a life-support system that costs tens of thousands of yuan a day, then “worth” acquires a clear monetary number, and belief begins to waver strangely.
This obscure discussion can stop here. Death is the most crucial part of the three great questions of human life. In a novel called If You Have Time After I Die, I will present my understanding of death.
Then there was yesterday’s ending: that beacon smoke, that fire, that bloody and blurred road were the fate of dying toward life. But their deaths bought people’s conscience and persistence, and that death continued. Perhaps that is another sense of dying toward life.