As a result of the increasing disorder in the universe, time has directionality, or the appearance of directionality fabricated by the human mind. Against all odds, complex human beings evolved in the face of expanding entropy, but with the inception of self-awareness humans were bound to think about life’s antithesis—the unavoidable, looming presence of death. For the duration of human life, one’s corporeal self is trapped in the present, simply existing, while one’s mind is able to wonder through a reconstructed past and anticipate the future due to the incredible faculties of the human brain. Centuries before modern science explained the functions of the brain, Augustine grasped the significance of time, shown in Book VI of the Confessions,
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He describes the happy man as “the man who…feels himself a citizen of the universe…untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life the greatest joy is to be found.” I find this to be the most idealistic depiction of happiness. By saying ‘a citizen of the universe’ he gives human beings a heighted sense of their importance in space, though any given individual on Earth is essentially dimensionless, meaning without internal volume, relative to all of space. In a parallel to geometry, humans are like points—they exist, but without dimension. Yet, humans are not dimensionless, and Russell feels an intimate attachment with all other life forms—past, present and future. I am likened to Russell’s description because he explains that one needs to arrive at moral actions spontaneously, rather than being too absorbed in the pursuit of one’s own virtue, making the only means to perform moral actions is through conscious self-denial. Seventeen-hundred years ago, it was enough to just define the route of all happiness as ‘enjoying God’, but this component of Augustine’s teachings is lost on me where as I am an avid believer in Bertrand Russell’s philosophy on
He describes the happy man as “the man who…feels himself a citizen of the universe…untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life the greatest joy is to be found.” I find this to be the most idealistic depiction of happiness. By saying ‘a citizen of the universe’ he gives human beings a heighted sense of their importance in space, though any given individual on Earth is essentially dimensionless, meaning without internal volume, relative to all of space. In a parallel to geometry, humans are like points—they exist, but without dimension. Yet, humans are not dimensionless, and Russell feels an intimate attachment with all other life forms—past, present and future. I am likened to Russell’s description because he explains that one needs to arrive at moral actions spontaneously, rather than being too absorbed in the pursuit of one’s own virtue, making the only means to perform moral actions is through conscious self-denial. Seventeen-hundred years ago, it was enough to just define the route of all happiness as ‘enjoying God’, but this component of Augustine’s teachings is lost on me where as I am an avid believer in Bertrand Russell’s philosophy on