Is there any difference in living for a person, cause, or movement or dying for it? There is no inherent difference. To say that you live for something implies that your life revolves around that in which you value. That without this value, your life has none. To die for an idea, to not wish to live without the idea existing, or to die to promote the continuation of the idea.
Yukio Mishima, a modern Japanese Nationalist author, explored the degrees of passion in his book series The Sea of Fertility. He said in interviews that his critiques of modern (1950s) Japan entailed that no one had anything they would die for anymore. He believed that to live a fulfilled life, you would need to be willing to die for that cause, whether that movement continues to live on without you. There cannot be the implication that your self sacrifice, would have any outcome for you to be willing to die for it.
Mishima gives another angle to this belief. He believes that our will as humans is intertwined with chance and the inevitability of history. Our actions are carried out by our will. Our actions have outcomes that are determined by chance. The action may follow through as “planned” or chance creates a different outcome. The *hope* that chance provides moment by moment can give us faith that our will has an impact on the world. Inevitability is the result of all chance and will at play. Without concern for what you do, the world continues by its own course, and the work you did in this life exists solely in the past.
What can we do? We know that what we want for the world today may not come to fruition. The passion that we have for a cause, the actions we take to secure a world that meets our ideals last as the “inevitably” allows for it to continue.
I take this ideology all the more reason to live for your own ideals. To live your life, passionate for a value, is to live. The world appears to work against us, and our society promotes us to be indolent and resist change. Change allows us to be free of constraints to create for ourselves a life that we want as each moment passes.
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