Some Reflections on Life Itself – B. Paul
A person is born into a definite life. They live their lives and, eventually, they die. But life remains and it is the most engaging subject for the living.
We are all living within a very definite life which exists independently of us. We live and work in this life, and we make our contribution to it. Life is not static. It develops and undergoes changes. We are talking here specifically about social life, the life we live as human beings, the life which has been created by human activity.
But social life is not hermetically sealed off from the rest of life. Living in this solar system, on the planet earth, we find nature as the reservoir from which we were born — the result of millions of years of evolution — and from which we derive our life. We are subject to the laws of nature. Human life is the highest product of the evolutionary process and we, as human beings, as thinking social matter, deal with nature in our everyday living.
As human beings who have created social life, we deal with the relations people enter into in the course of carrying out their manifold activities, from production to other spheres of human endeavour. We live in a society and thus the question also arises of the relations within this society, the economic foundation on which it is erected, its political structures and its cultural and ideological organization.
There definitely are problems in the conditions of present-day life, but we approach them with optimism, from the standpoint of actively creating those conditions which are to the liking of the people. We subordinate ourselves to the laws of social development, just as we do to the laws of nature. This is why we are called human beings. We make nature and society provide our needs — the human needs. Only in this way can we rise from being blind slaves of nature and passive onlookers of social life, from beasts of burden, to being the masters of nature and the creators of social life for ourselves.
It is evident that life is a very broad field and the most exciting one at that. We can deliberate on some of the problems and the attitude we take towards them.