On Nature

Life is the struggle to become an individual. The continual failure of nature to preserve itself in an organized, complex, individuated form is responsible for change, manifested in time, which characterizes existence.

All things are in flux even while everything is interconnected into a single existence. Change consists of opposites, going from hot to cold, dead and alive. The contradiction subsists in nature's taking of individual forms.

Any single thing is always consistent with itself. Nature can be understood either in the abstract, as a whole subtracted from its instances, or by individual examples separated from others. Yet the activity of life is change not stasis. It is a process. It is a process from individual instance to another individual instance. This is understood from experience; all things appear in motion and opposed to one another. The intellect can through its own prejudices discover the underlying nature of existence. Heres how.

Every individual either owes its existence to itself or another individual. It is clear that individuals do not always exist, coming in and out of existence. Individuals change; they are affected by other things and have effects on other things. Individuals in nature depend on another individual for their own existence. Yet if every individual depends on another, this leads to an infinite regress. We have to explain each explanation. If everything needs an explanation, there cannot be any arbitrary stopping points. The truth of sufficient reason is true for posited things, individuals. From nothing nothing comes.

Nothing is not the absence of being, but of a particular conception of being. It is the absence of intentional being, of being known to consciousness. Consciousness is aware of being both spatially and temporally, in separate bits and pieces.

Posited being requires another posited being for explanation because its unique existence is made in reference to nothing, the absence of said posited being.

As nature continually changes according to our knowledge of it, it escapes meaning and taken together reason too. Individual things can be given meaning and reason, but not existence as such which avoids individuality.

This means that from our standpoint, life is tragic. The good is the fulfillment of the will, the bad which opposes it. The achievement of the good requires knowledge, which is only possible with particular contingent things. The achievement of any good is fleeting, it will perish in time. Whatever we will, whether it is satisfied in nature is beyond the will. There is no necessary connection between our will and changes in existence, as our consciousness depends totally on existence and is only independent because it is selective nature.

Life is the continual failure to seek identity between existence and consciousness.