ABSTRACT
Mr Jens Jacobsen, the singular Dane of the pre-revolutionary bonds, filled up suitcases with his scribbled thoughts. The most fundamental of these, according to one of my arrangements, was that Reality, all of what exists, is a single and indivisible whole. This is Nature or Life, more particularly Life-Forces and Physical Forces. The Life-Forces, more primal, are Self-Preservation, Inquisitiveness, Sex, Balance, Logic, and Compassion. The whole thing, Nature or Life, is most certainly not to be thought of as God, a vulgar fiction. However, only Nature or Life is truly conscious. Like the amoeba, midge, newt, donkey and elephant, we are Nature’s products, subject to determinism and evolution. Our derivative consciousness is trivial. What is basic about us, as in the case of amoeba, midge and the rest, is that we are not selves or egos. The pretence that we are, including the primal disaster of the first-person pronoun ‘I’, is the source of the awfulness of human life. Jens sometimes contemplated the setting up of a Jacobsen International Philosophy Essay Competition. Use of the first person in a submitted essay, being an insult to Nature, would disqualify the candidate absolutely.
