“What Justifies a Life? In Memory of Liam McCarty”

Jared Morningstar writes for Medium in memoriam of his friend Liam, and on the intrinsic value of life in relation to death:

To be is also to experience, and the conscious experience of human life is something of both irreducible individuality and incomparable richness. In merely experiencing life as ourselves — in all its complexity and dynamism — we are adding something indelible, something of bottomless value to the whole of existence. In experience, the occultation of the world is overcome — the real existence of this whole beautiful creation shines forth. Real relationality is achieved, and the mute things of the world are unveiled as radiant, vibrant, yearning for their existentiation and transfiguration.

Beyond all achievement or impact or contribution, the inalienable beauty of our sheer experience justifies our lives on a fundamental level.

Rather than being something atomistic and solipsistic, our experience of life is the highest-order exemplification of the very basic cosmic urge towards unveiling, disclosure, and relation — and in human experience these things are all brought to their aesthetic heights through the unique ways that our perception is able to intensify, transfigure, and harmonize the things with which we are in relation.

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