--- Kendall Clark <kendall at monkeyfist.com> wrote: <<Actually, Singer spends a lot of time showing that life itself, per se, is *not* "sacred" or precious>>.
Well, "sacredness" is not, in my usage, a transcendental term. It is an attitude which I choose to adopt.
One can argue, along with Schopenhauer, that we humans are sort of like locust, we sleep, we breed, we die...there is no other telos towards which we aspire really...it's all got to do in some way or another with this reproduction of the species.
In that sense, we are not sacred. However, such a point of view comes from seeing sacredness as tantamount to having a "higher" purpose than just living. But what about living and being...isn't there something sacred about that?
If I can be so crude as to quote a pop-zenner, Alan Watts, you dont dance to get to the other side of the room, you dance to dance.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Wender's "Wings of Desire". In it, as you know, the angel bored with his transcendental existence wants a history of his own, and so, in spite of his knowlege of human pain, suffering and joy, "descends" (or maybe ascends) into the turmoil of being alive. That's sacred.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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