APQ - APPON PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Edward Osborne Wilson is reported to have attempted answers to the puzzles of human existence namely, who am I? what should I do in life? What is the meaning of life? Is there a hereafter for humanity? These interrogatives which have situated the human species on an evolutionary continuum have not been fully answered by humans from time immemorial though, they still remained beholden to primitive survival impulses. The paper argues on this score that, as a being that encapsulate change, discontinuity and continuity, man's dissolution through death is not an external and public fact that creates a sense of loss and saddens humanity, but an internal possibility of his being. It is the fulfilment of the Man project of self-liberation, self-transcendence, and a process of surpassing one's existential condition. We shall argue further that, in this form of change, man ceases to be the impersonal social being among beings and has freed himself from the servitude of the anonymous “they” and thereby opened himself to his own most potentiality for being. In birth, there is the change of nonbeing to being, of nothingness to somethingness. In death man changes his constitution of somaticity to pure being; to a spiritual reality. We shall argue the conclusion that, in death, Man further becomes the most vitalizing fact of life and the cardinal indicator of authentic selfhood. He transcends from nothingness to somethingness.

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