# Does completeness signify a lack of life? **URL:** \ **Category:** Metaphysics & Epistemology\ **Created:** [September 24, 2026, 8:28am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222 "2026-09-24T08:28:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Astorre](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/astorre/32/545_2.png) [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 10:50am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/21 "2026-09-29T10:50:01Z")
Yes, indeed. I agree with that. Many trivial thoughts—known and self-evident since childhood—can gather new context and nuances over the years, truly retaining their vitality. Many simple things can continue to unfold in their details, never ceasing to amaze. Moreover, there can be far more life in simple emotions shared vulnerably with another person than in an endless search. That is wonderful. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 10:56am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/22 "2026-09-29T10:56:33Z")
This is dear to me. The **simplest** things are the most wonderful. They are the deepest things. I find this insight indirectly illustrated in Joyce. His plots are simple, because they can _afford_ to be. It’s all “one story” that is as “deep” as you allow it to be. “The wise man sees not the same tree as the fool sees.” Blake. The quote may be a paraphrase. We also find this in Leibniz. Heidegger famously obsessed over “one thought”, over the “simplest fact” of “manifestation” itself. Spinoza celebrated the rule over the exception. Exceptions are for dunces. That’s kid stuff. The rule is mostly invisible, just because it is the rule. Whitehead noticed this. The constantly present is what is detected with the most difficultly. We get a revolution in philosophy or art just by seeing the tip of our nose. ---
**Author:** ![Chelydra](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/chelydra/32/659_2.png) [@Chelydra](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Chelydra)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 11:56am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/23 "2026-09-29T11:56:03Z")
Sometimes, in musing through the search for something fundamental, there comes a point, a strong feeling, that completing the search would mean ceasing to exist. The question arises almost involuntarily: do I really want to go there now? Somehow after that, fullness arrives, and ordinary life resumes. Yesterday, thinking about [identity and difference in change](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337), the path led to “lack” and “life” and “openness” and “ideal”, and something in this OP was recognised there. It occurred to me that completeness is indistinguishable from non-existence. That identity is the lack the thing is. So life is the ongoing synthesis. The not-yet. The difference still being made. The living thing is the one still lacking. Death, structurally, is not the opposite of life. It is completion. Cessation. Fullness is not completeness. It is so much difference-making at once, so much presence, that it feels like it could stop, approaching completion but not crossing it. There is just returning as overflow, experiencing the structure before narrowing gave individual existence its shape. Something like a journey to the edge where lack meets fullness, and finding they touch. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 12:02pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/24 "2026-09-29T12:02:51Z")
> [@Chelydra](#): > > That identity is the lack the thing is. So life is the ongoing synthesis. The not-yet. The difference still being made. The living thing is the one still lacking. Damn, that is some poetry. **identity is the lack the thing is** I wish I could claim that phrase as mine. That’s my sincerest complement, which is poetic envy. This is basically what I mean when I say that the “future” of the thing is “most” of the thing. “Most” of the thing is not only not now but also not **yet.** The world never arrives, in the sense of “it **has** arrived.” The world “is” open roaring arrival. This “is” is negated as never complete, never closed and dead. All showing, just because it is specified, is also hiding. Specification is exclusive. “Therefore” showing is hiding. But it’s only “one phenomenon” that’s being discussed here in its elusive wholeness. > [@Chelydra](#): > > Death, structurally, is not the opposite of life. It is completion. Cessation. This is very close to Feuerbach’s early “death mysticism.” He is one of the deepest thinkers on this issue, in my view. Another criminally forgotten seer, and arguably the great proto-Heidegger. ---
**Author:** ![Chelydra](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/chelydra/32/659_2.png) [@Chelydra](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Chelydra)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 12:29pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/25 "2026-09-29T12:29:34Z")
> [@j\_j](#): > > The world “is” open roaring arrival. Yes, life is the thinging rather than the thing. Mine was only ever returned to me through others, never for owning. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 1:12pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/26 "2026-09-29T13:12:15Z")
> [@Chelydra](#): > > life is the thing **ing** rather than the thing. well said ! …The world-ing of the world and thing-ing of the things in the world. it’s such a brutally simple point, but elusive for just that reason, in the context of a inherited “static picture picture.” > [@Chelydra](#): > > Mine was only ever returned to me through others, never for owning. Same here. We are **fundamentally** “performers” and “witnesses.” The subject is an “e-ject.” The subject is ajar and not a jar. The subject is “broken open,” the situated “how” or specificity of the world’s world-ing or (non)arrival. ---
**Author:** ![BestGuessYet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/2bfe46/32.png) [@BestGuessYet](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/BestGuessYet)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 2:27pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/27 "2026-09-29T14:27:05Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Life as _becoming_—its very possibility—lies in incompleteness, in a lack of rigidity, in plasticity; qualities made possible, in turn, by weakness and pliability. If we can face uncertainty–and even learn to love it–we can continue to grow. ---
**Author:** ![Astorre](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/astorre/32/545_2.png) [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 3:12pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/28 "2026-09-29T15:12:37Z")
It’s amazing. If I may, let me put it poetically: Lack = a condition of the living That is all I wanted to say. ---
**Author:** ![Astorre](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/astorre/32/545_2.png) [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 3:15pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/29 "2026-09-29T15:15:21Z")
I would add: it is not so much a matter of confronting uncertainty as of co-existing with it. After all, it is uncertainty that compels us to find certainty—something made possible through openness to vulnerability… ---
**Author:** ![BestGuessYet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/2bfe46/32.png) [@BestGuessYet](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/BestGuessYet)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 3:33pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/30 "2026-09-29T15:33:00Z")
We can even seek it out, as when we put our beliefs in a public place and hope to have them attacked. I don’t want to be the same guy tomorrow as I am today. It’s too boring. ---
**Author:** ![Astorre](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/astorre/32/545_2.png) [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 3:42pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/31 "2026-09-29T15:42:29Z")
> [@BestGuessYet](#): > > We can even seek it out, as when we put our beliefs in a public place and hope to have them attacked. Oh, that’s my favorite. “Dissuade me—but with arguments so sound that I have no choice but to agree!” I hope that’s why many of us are here. But what is it? Intellectual masochism? Or a craving for the wound inflicted by an encounter with a genuine “Other”? Honestly, in this scenario, I’d be satisfied with even just a “You’re right, you son of a bitch!”—though I admit, being utterly demolished is more gratifying. ---
**Author:** ![FireOlogist](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/fireologist/32/597_2.png) [@FireOlogist](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/FireOlogist)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 5:26pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/32 "2026-09-29T17:26:53Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Life as _becoming_—its very possibility—lies in incompleteness, in a lack of rigidity, in plasticity; qualities made possible, in turn, by weakness and pliability. > [@Wayfarer](#): > > “The highest form of goodness is like water. Water nourishes the ten thousand things and does not try to. It contentedly settles in places that people disdain. Thus, it is very close to the Tao.” I like to Taoist quote better. Because rigidity is brittle, fragile - weak. Plasticity and pliability are strong - they allow persistence, as opposed to dissolution. We don’t want to put ourselves in the position of thinking “weakness is strength” because that misunderstands both, or denies any difference, or eliminates both concepts. The possibility of living, of becoming, involves incompleteness, but that is only if you make a judgment about what is happening. One can say the acorn is complete, make it rigid. Or one can withhold judgment, and see the acorn dissolve into the sapling, then the adult tree. The openness to the fluidity and plasticity is a willingness to withhold judgment, not a pre-condition to becoming. Becoming is happening regardless of our response to it. But what gets lost is that something rigid always remains along with the changes. The acorn becomes the sapling that becomes the adult tree - but the acorn didn’t become a Maple, or a fish - it remained an Oak throughout - otherwise we wouldn’t have noticed a difference between the acorn and the adult. This is not refute the wisdom of the Taoist statement, but to augment it. Because Oaks themselves may one day become conifers (or some other evolutionary new thing). It is to admit we only understand the wisdom of the plastic if we withhold judgment on the rigid as well. Being isn’t false, because becoming is true. Becoming involves moments of being, allowing something to persist long enough to become something else. Becoming houses persistence _and_ change - or becoming is not. The key wisdom here is that which **“nourishes, but does not try to.”** Positive nourishment, but zero manipulation in the trying. It is allowing the nature of things to reveal themselves and be as they are. This wisdom is not denying different natures exist; and for there to be different natures, something needs to fix itself rigidly, for a time. So we should not make the rigid the highest form of goodness, but should recognize that something _like_ water is more like a highest good. To remain water, water allows itself to settle anywhere. But this highest good allows water to continue (rigidly persist) as water. We can play out the analogy with ice. Is ice an instance of water becoming rigid? No, because ice remains water (H2O) settled in a cold place. The rigidity is found in the Taoist use of “water” to say what the highest good is like, as opposed to a “brick”. It is the fixed properties of water that make water the better analogy for the wisdom being expressed. ---
**Author:** ![FireOlogist](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/fireologist/32/597_2.png) [@FireOlogist](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/FireOlogist)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/33 "2026-09-29T17:39:28Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Lack = a condition of the living My above post was metaphysical, and about all change and all persistence. Your statement here I think only applies to human beings. We are the instantiation of a break from the flow of being/becoming. We are the broken creatures, lacking, seeking what we judge ourselves to lack. Turning mere desires into certain needs. Only we have this problem. Water, acorns, animals, planets - they never try to do anything. They all go with the flow. The acorn doesn’t seek to become the sapling. Not like teen-agers steal their parents car keys, sneak in a bar and talk about how their parents don’t know anything about anything. We stop, resist and challenge nature, and wonder. We doubt, and create a gaping hole that we claim can only be filled by certainty in our judgments. But I agree, although we are incomplete, the other way to fill this hole is to let yourself be vulnerable - to not resist the fact of our incompleteness. Then we start to realize it is our very attempt to control what we become that fractured the ability of nature to carry us where we must go in the first place. A life of 90 years is a process of being born. It is ok to be transformed, especially when you take a long look at what we are. We are all acorns, telling ourselves that we can be trees without first being saplings (and without understanding what trees are, since we are acorns). ---
**Author:** ![BestGuessYet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/2bfe46/32.png) [@BestGuessYet](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/BestGuessYet)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 9:18pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/34 "2026-09-29T21:18:37Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Oh, that’s my favorite. “Dissuade me—but with arguments so sound that I have no choice but to agree!” There are those who think the greatest philosopher is the one who can recite the most Big Names and integrate their Big Ideas in the finest sermon, with the most syllables. But I don’t think so. For me, the greatest philosopher is the one who won’t flinch in the face of a stressful question about his own thought. That’s what philosophy is, in my conception—the hunger to be shown wrong. So when I go around a forum such as this one, I look for the guy (or gal) who stands up to difficult questions. The guy who actually seeks them out. > [@Astorre](#): > > I hope that’s why many of us are here. I personally wouldn’t place a large bet on that. I think I’ve noticed that urge in you and a few others, but it seems generally pretty rare to me. Our beliefs are integrated with our identity. I am the one who thinks X. So an attack on the X can feel pretty scary, down below our conscious thought. It can be a primal fear. To wobble my beliefs is to wobble my self. > [@Astorre](#): > > But what is it? Intellectual masochism? Or a craving for the wound inflicted by an encounter with a genuine “Other”? If there were no others here, it would be unbearably boring. There would be no startlement. > [@Astorre](#): > > Honestly, in this scenario, I’d be satisfied with even just a “You’re right, you son of a bitch!”—though I admit, being utterly demolished is more gratifying. I’ve debated for years. In my view, the best debaters are the ones who would never devastate you but would instead gently probe. Firmly and even relentlessly, but gently. We have to consider that ego is on the line. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2026, 9:29pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/35 "2026-09-29T21:29:50Z")
I hope that others find that this fits in here. > But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is appeased by the identification of one thing with another, a datum which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving definitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoy us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever (provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to spin. > > This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain says,— > > “A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.… The path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained.” > > But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. Our mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of its experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a nonentity enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. But there is no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering “Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?” and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain’s words are so untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, that the craving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says, “The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.” > > The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. Absolute existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only has pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational demands. > > But for those who deem Hegel’s heroic effort to have failed, nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. The philosopher’s logical tranquillity is thus in essence no other than the boor’s. They differ only as to the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does so immediately, and is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. See the reverence of Carlyle for brute fact: “There is an infinite significance in fact.” “Necessity,” says Dühring, and he means not rational but given necessity, “is the last and highest point that we can reach.… It is not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is.” > > Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God’s fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost datum. Such also is the attitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_. Lotze, Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence. > > But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds. The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. To religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,—as Wordsworth says, “thought is not; in enjoyment it expires.” Ontological emotion so fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that “swiftly arose and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.” At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool. > > Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance. But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being available for few persons and at few times, and even in these being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy. Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally unsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of the race. Every generation will produce its _Job_, its _Hamlet_, its _Faust_, or its _Sartor Resartus_. [source](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe_and_Other_Essays_in_Popular_Philosophy/The_Sentiment_of_Rationality) ---
**Author:** ![Astorre](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/astorre/32/545_2.png) [@Astorre](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Astorre)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2026, 12:38pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/36 "2026-10-01T12:38:20Z")
Life is a leap from the vagina to the grave. ---
**Author:** ![Elephant](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/elephant/32/294_2.png) [@Elephant](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Elephant)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2026, 4:47pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/37 "2026-10-01T16:47:01Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Knowledge is power. Surprisingly, by imposing structure on events, refining details, and extracting specifics from a unified whole, we seem to gain control over them. Yet, paradoxically, in gaining that control and power—and the rigidity that comes with it—we lose that very sense of vitality and wonder at the simple things. It follows, then, that the knowledge which grants power simultaneously renders the knower less alive; the “magic” vanishes. Yes, nicely put! In philosophy, finding the truth is not about being happy or alive or motivated. I don’t remember what philosopher said that _truth is important even if it kills me._ To philosophize is to die. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2026, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/38 "2026-10-01T20:45:51Z")
> [@Astorre](#): > > Life is a leap from the vagina to the grave. It’s a bit like a coin with two sides, or a portal. We pass thru the grave, get our memory washed off, and come out as a new baby on the other side of the coin/portal, the vagina. To drop from the vagina is to be “owed” a second drop, a return visit to/through the other side of that coin/portal. To me this is the big “ancient” thought, the “equivalence” of entanglement of sex and death, vagina and grave. “The life of the child is the death of the parent.” ( Schop). “All children are mirrors of death” ( Sartre). > [@Elephant](#): > > To philosophize is to die. Well said ! ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2026, 8:51pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/39 "2026-10-01T20:51:18Z")
> [@BestGuessYet](#): > > There are those who think the greatest philosopher is the one who can recite the most Big Names and integrate their Big Ideas in the finest sermon, with the most syllables. > > But I don’t think so. For me, the greatest philosopher is the one who won’t flinch in the face of a stressful question about his own thought. > > That’s what philosophy is, in my conception—the hunger to be shown wrong. > > So when I go around a forum such as this one, I look for the guy (or gal) who stands up to difficult questions. The guy who actually seeks them out. I’m with you on this. I do intensely value some of the greats, but ideally one does this not because one parrots or respects what is safely famous but because the authors are there as especially loaded with this virtue you emphasize. As I see it, we get theories of enduring value by exposing those theories to danger. As Popper beautifully put it, we let our theories do our dying for us. A serious philosopher is genuinely bothered by cognitive dissonance, a major “plot hole” in his or her story. A tourist is content to pose in the coffee shop with a “deep thinker” or be overheard quoting. But the hard part is paraphrasing, not scripture quoting. I’d bet more on the negative creep who is suspicious of the greats than the fanboy who chooses one scripture rather than another like a consumer. At the same time, I tend to expect serious philosophers to read the strongest peers that preceded them, because I see the art as at least as cumulative and self-referential as painting, etc. ---
**Author:** ![j\_j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ab097/32.png) [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2026, 8:58pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222/40 "2026-10-01T20:58:20Z")
> [@BestGuessYet](#): > > If there were no others here, it would be unbearably boring. > There would be no startlement. > > Astorre: This is a good point. I also agree with @Astorre. There is something masochistic in the philosopher. As Hegel puts, we “tarry with the negative.” The way of the philosopher is the way of death and devastation. > [@BestGuessYet](#): > > Our beliefs are integrated with our identity. I am the one who thinks X. > So an attack on the X can feel pretty scary, down below our conscious thought. It can be a primal fear. To wobble my beliefs is to wobble my self. Precisely ! Following the pragmatists, I’d primarily locate belief in **visceral and emotive** habits. We might consider the “ego ideal” that is being **performed.** We are performers for one another, striving for admiration. But, again referring to Hegel, we don’t rate just anyone as a judge worth impressing. I see it more in terms of elitist impulse that is working toward a superior in-group. In art we have various “movements.” Fiery young people “rebel together,” and this makes the work less lonely. A philosopher who offends and surprises no one is presumably just parroting what “Everybody Knows.” Of course I am not proposing that novelty **as such** is of value. Randomly generated nonsense is sub-mediocre not excellent. Mediocrity is the congealed revolution of yesterday, safely “quotable” by those who may or may not have a strong sense of what they are quoting. [Previous page](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222.md?page=1) [Next page](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/does-completeness-signify-a-lack-of-life/3222.md?page=3)