Another Choice

The legitimacy of satisfaction

The more vivid is our satisfaction and the more intense is our sense of existing.

This density of experience acts as an anchorage and we then forget that death will come: that the accretion we are, however complex and capable, is but temporary and remains open to the absolute destruction of its physical, concrete base – the only base we know, of which we can verify the presence, or the disappearance.

Along with the diversification of our human experience and the increase of its possibilities, we each have been able to explore different modes of satisfaction – rewards for our efforts.

For our condition is such that, not only our very existence is condemned, but it demands of us the acceptance of effort.

Indeed, our physical humanity seems to be operational only when we feed it with our effort: every task asks for an effort, every aim necessitates the sustained management of the effort to be contributed, the needs of the day-to-day life require an effort and, thus, every satisfaction appears that much more deserved.

The question of how legitimate satisfaction is arises insofar as the elaboration and transmission of a common space seem to be viable only when each one endeavors not to exact one’s own satisfaction to the detriment of others and of the group as a whole.

And it is out of this necessity that the moral sense of a given civilization forms itself.

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