Rob asked:

I'm a grade 12 student at a small private school in Nova Scotia, Canada. I take an International
Baccalaureate course called 'Theory of Knowledge', it is essentially a class that is based on
metaphysics and the like. I am doing an essay on a topic that has bothered me for some time, Is
there a difference between existing and living?

Would you agree that people that exist are people that question the life they lead? They are the
people that try to break free of the box of dogma, or have broken free! Or if I may use Plato as a
reference, are people that exist the ones that break they're chains and try to walk out of the cave and
into the light! And then all the other people that do not do this and do not even recognize the
importance of this, are the people that simply live. Would you agree with this?

I have started to take the view that in all "learning" one must try to lose their ego. Its hard for me to
put this concept into prose as I am not complete in my views yet. But, I think that before anyone can
become "enlightened" they must lose their ego. Ego, more or less, represents a "false" or straw
foundation that they build their truths on. Once one has broken this ego or come to terms with it, they
begin to learn or rather see things for what they are. Is this a valid assumption, and are there any
other clearer ways to explain this?

============

There is much about your question I do not understand. It is, I think, partly because of the way you
use some words like "exist" and "enlightened" and "living"; but also because your way of thinking
about philosophy is very different from the way philosophy is thought about in most of the English
speaking academies.

It is, for instance, clear to me that there is a big difference between existence and living. Inanimate
objects like chair or stars certainly exist, but they do not live, they are not alive, or even capable of
being alive. So, let us confine your question to just living things like animals and people. I think that
your use of the term "living" ("vivant") carries with it more than only its biological meaning. It carries
also a judgement of value and also an emotional meaning which might be expressed by someone
who says of someone, "He does not live, he only exists." This would perhaps be more prosaically
expressed as, "He lives only a very dull and pointless life." But I think this would be a very personal
judgement about how another lives his life, which the person himself might very well not agree with.
The great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, lived what might be called a very dull life. For instance, he
never left his native city in Prussia. But he is universally acknowledged to have been one the greatest
philosophers who has ever lived. So, whether a person is "alive" in your sense, can be a very
subjective matter and not anything for which there is some generally universal standard.

You seem to believe that there is a kind of "enlightenment" that some people achieve which makes
them different from others, and that they are those who "live" rather than "exist," in your way of
speaking. But there have been philosophers (and I shall speak only of them since I know most about
them) who like the English philosophers John Locke and David Hume, or even the more recent
philosophers, Bertrand Russell, or G.E. Moore, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, tried to think though and
understand very complex problems like, for instance, the nature of human knowledge and belief; or
the nature of causal connection in science; or whether we could know there is a world external to our
minds; or even what we mean when we assert of something, human or not, that it exists (or deny it
exists) and who would not have claimed any great experience of "enlightenment" in the way I think
you mean that term, but who have made great contributions to our understanding of philosophy:
perhaps as much as Plato, or perhaps even more.

So, I think, myself, that it is not true that what you call "enlightenment" is the difference between those
who "only" exist, and those who, as you put it "live." I think that the value of men's lives differ in more
complex ways than that, and are largely judged by the contributions they make to the world and other
men in various ways.

Kenneth Stern