Is a chair still a chair when all pieces are taken apart? If not, at what point does it stop being a chair?
From time to time, we find ourselves pausing to wonder: Where is that fine cut? Where do we draw the line?
I feel like I am witnessing a death as I watched her being spoon fed. Life is deteriorating from her motionless face. All that energy, stubbornness, and her sense of humour have gone. When life has been pushed to its bare minimum, all that is left is the tangible aspect of life. A bit like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in its perfect depicture of a dystopia, the sole purpose of life is to live for the sake of living - all individual qualities stripped.
“We are the dead”, said Winston, implying that life is not worth living if lived in such way.
Winston has a point. A human life is not to be justified simply via its capacity to maintain life. A plant life is to be justified by its capacity to maintain life – given environment allows. Human beings are a bit more complex, or perhaps more ‘snobby’. Humans are social creatures that regardless how anti-social one is, social interactions play a major part on individual health and community development. Human beings require emotional and cultural fulfillment. When life has been pushed to its barest minimum, there is only one emotional desire and that is to ease pain or discomfort. In terms of cultural fulfilment, all her/his past becomes insignificant to the present. Imagine being in the face of a beast in middle of nowhere, there is no other thought other than to ease oneself from the fear.
On the other hand, we may be taking the simple pleasures in life for granted. This includes our cognitive ability to process information which is just as much of a human quality as emotions and cultural influences. From a post-modernist perspective, whose is it to say one’s life is not worth living other than the individual who's living it?
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