Another argument often comes back in the mouths of the irresponsible ones who generate us. For them, it is a matter of "leaving a trace". Curious impulse.
Let us immediately point out that from an ethological point of view, this is akin to the attitude many mammals have to leave droppings on the ground to mark their presence or their territory. The dog that urinates on the lamp post also leaves a trace; this trace however, unlike the baby, benefits from the privilege of not having to endure the grueling constraints of existence...
From a psychoanalytical angle, as one knows, this desire to "leave a trace" is rooted in the behaviour of the toddler who identifies its first excrements with a gift and endeavours to make of them the very judicious present to its moved mother... Thus, there is nothing very evolved nor very mature in this desire to mark one's temporal space while making present to one's contemporaries of a "thing" fallen down from a viscera... There is definitely too much of Freudian Id in this identity fantasy for it to constitute itself as a credible argument.
But trace for trace, if it really matters to leave one in order not to deny our mammalian instinct nor betray our futile hope of immortality, it seems to me that a work of art, science, thought or philanthropy, has all the same a little more value than a catastrophe of flesh. Excrement for excrement, some are more useful and more noble than others. We must admit that the fact of leaving a fleshly offspring lies within reach of any cockroach or earthworm. Nothing, by the way, more amusing than watching a cow calve, or a swine fertilize its sow.
In truth, one generates carnal creatures only by inability to do better: generating spiritual creations...
"Leaving a trace". Very strange idea. There are so many mediocre people: and thus, they desire to leave a trace of their mediocrity! Spare yourself this trouble, you insignificant gentlemen and gentlewomen, we will do very well without any remembrance of you. Unnoticed during your lifetime you hope to be noticed post-mortem? You want to perpetuate your name? What good is it, if your child imitates you and remains as anonymous as yourself?
Recognize the absurd, even the burlesque, of this will to reproduce in order "not to fall into oblivion" since within a few quick generations your greatgrandchildren will not even know your first name nor the color of your hair, as for the luxuriance of your personality... If you dread the transience as well as the drama of our mortality (in which however you have no scruple to enlist the depositaries of your paranoid fear of death...), rather engrave your anthroponym on a granite outcrop: some petroglyphs cheerfully cross the millennia. Or ask someone to carve on your tombstone an elegant quatrain of your invention, the latter will still be legible when your pitiful heirs have already been nibbled by other wormlings.
