Book: Philosophy of Life Instinct: Prologue
By: Shashi Sastry
Tags: Metaphysics, Happiness, Philosophy, Life, Books

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Book: Philosophy of Life Instinct: Prologue

Prologue

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It all kept coming back to our being a form of matter called Life that has a need to know combined with serious limitations in its ability to understand and explain reality.

The origin of the quest for knowledge and the limitations arose from a single fundamental reality, as far as I could see. It is a reality that appears simple but is not. I have regularly questioned my view of this in forty years of thinking, waiting for it to change, to prove false. But it hasn’t. This reality is what I call — The Life Instinct.

I will elaborate on the dimensions of The Life Instinct in Chapter 4. In subsequent chapters, I will consider essential features of life from the perspective of The Life Instinct. We will try to understand each feature’s origins, the implications, and how to work with it.

In my journey through the many puzzles, I have found they belong to one of two categories: metaphysical or philosophical enquiries. We will apply the Philosophy of Life Instinct to shine a light on both types — Metaphysical ones and those from the Humanities.

Book Structure

Part I of the book delves into reality, time and our ability to comprehend them, in the context of The Life Instinct. The metaphysical questions and their answers are not practically critical, but as they are the foundations of the philosophy, they need to be dealt with — and I begin with them.

In Part II, I take up the philosophical enquiries that broadly correspond to our world’s sphere and our existence within it, along with other forms of life. It is an anthropocentric area of enquiry and could be termed the Humanities, being questions that humans ask about themselves, from their viewpoint in the cosmos. I have asked the vital questions that concern us and tried to answer them as best I can in the light of the Life Instinct.

In Part III, I consider: How will the answers stand the test of time? Will they make sense in a hundred, a thousand or a million years from now? Will the questions themselves change by then? What are the finalities on how we should live our lives? What is the purest form of this philosophy that can act as our daily guide to living the most wholesome lives we can?

How to Use this Book

Despite the above broad structure, as long as you have read Chapter 4 — ‘The Nature of Life and The Life Instinct’, all the other chapters can be read independently. I have written them to make sense on their own. They are beads on the single string of the philosophy that holds them all up. Chapter 4 sets up that underlying, unifying theme.

The book may sometimes feel like a hairball of strands of thought, doubling back, intersecting and running parallel for short and long distances. But go with it, because once you get the underlying philosophy and viewpoint under your skin, it will be your ever-present and reliable friend that jumps out to tackle any problem, esoteric or banal.

Reading all the topics will give you a well-rounded ability to deal with almost everything that concerns us in life, so I recommend it. However, you may choose to focus on the problems that interest you at a point in time and move through the others as per your needs or curiosity.

We may never know in an absolute sense if this philosophy and metaphysics are accurate. But if it is more or less so, all other philosophies and metaphysics, large and small, would be subsets of it. It is not hubris. There can be none of that as we, and everything we create, will vanish one day, forgotten and unmissed. Rather, it is confidence, that entirely within the ambit of our world, minuscule and inconsequential, this framework of thought will help us survive better.

This philosophy’s aspects will appear to correspond to other ones, particularly rationalism, scepticism, objectivism, vitalism, existentialism, and nihilism. There are also ‘-logies’ such as evolutionary ontology, psychology, sociology and so on, that apply to several explorations in this book. However, I have not used these terms in this book because I want the reader to come to it without any such prior frameworks. I also want to stay with a single, simple, unifying theme throughout the various questions, rather than deviate into well developed but distracting academic areas.

Of course, correlation is unavoidable for those who are conversant with the existing philosophical schools and movements. However, I would advise them to set those aside for a while and read every part of this book from one viewpoint only — its premise. One may be tempted to coin a label, for example, ‘Life Instinctivism’, but the concept goes substantially beyond both life and instinct, so I deprecate the term myself.

This book does not cover every aspect of life, but you can apply it to answer any other question if you understand and accept this philosophy. Once we consider both Metaphysics and Humanities in the light of the Life Instinct, this mental paradigm will be a powerful tool for any seeker of knowledge, insight and wisdom.

There is no doubt in my mind of the fundamental soundness of this philosophy. However, I may not have applied it correctly in all cases, in minor and major ways. For that, I readily accept complete responsibility.

If this edifice can be improved further through its application by you, my reader, and through your experiences, thoughts and feedback, I will be delighted.