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Robin Williams in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" (1996) |
by Andy Nowicki
The materialist conception of reality posits
as self-evident the non-existence of the human soul. To materialists, a living
being is a meat puppet controlled by no hidden hand; it merely flops about
pitifully on its arbitrarily-constructed stage, until such time when events
conspire to cause its demise.
In the materialistic conception, a creature
like man simply has no enduring imperative beyond a desperate—and ultimately
futile- drive for self-preservation. Notions of an afterlife and an eternal
destiny are simply delusions he has sold himself to give his paltry existence
the illusion of meaning. The very complexity of his consciousness has, in fact,
become his curse. The reality of death, meanwhile, can only strike terror into
his heart, and he strains miserably to avoid it. Pain, too, is something he
cannot abide, for pain is a reminder of his mortality. Pleasure, conversely, is
the main distraction that he craves, but it is an ever-fleeting one, which
brings increasingly diminishing returns, given the constantly obtruding reminders
of his approaching extinction.
