[Your post] actually will get on the coronary heart of each an outline of and the optimum response to the meaning-of-life dilemma, doesn’t it? … How on this planet will we take care of the popularity of pointlessness whereas feeling a pure inclination to have interaction with life? … your response seems to be precisely the identical as mine that I characterised as “pure expertise” in my “What’s It All About” essay: there isn’t any answer, solely a solution to cope.
Studying your put up provides me the identical type of consolation that Magee’s Ultimate Questions did by way of confidence that my ideas about MOL weren’t bizarre or an indication of weak spot—his a few visceral response to the horror of it and yours, a reasoned response to residing with it. Truly, the way in which you set it’s in all probability extra correct than mine … It’s not restricted to reflecting simply the ethereal excessive of transcendent expertise however is definitely inclusive of a broad vary of down-to-earth satisfaction to be present in a lot of on a regular basis expertise that makes us really feel as if life is price residing though we understand that nothing cosmically purposeful will come of it (as far as we are able to presently anticipate, a la Magee, anyway).
My response:
As to your “what does all of it imply” questions, you don’t actually suppose that I’ve sturdy clear replies when nobody else since Plato has had a lot success! It might be extra fruitful to ask about what diploma of confidence one can anticipate from tried solutions, since too excessive expectations are sure to be dashed. It’s a case of Aristotle’s recommendation to not search for extra confidence than the subject material permits. At any charge, if I’m proper about there being a powerful volitional issue right here, why not favor an optimistic over a pessimistic angle, which is one thing one can management to some extent? This isn’t a solution, however a solution to dwell.
I additionally agree with you that which means have to be discovered within the small issues as Simon Critchley has argued,
Critchley finds an identical perception in what the poet Wallace Stevens known as “the plain sense of issues.” In Stevens’ poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” the setting is a funeral service. In a single room we discover merriment and ice cream, in one other a corpse. The ice cream represents the appetites, the highly effective want for bodily issues; the corpse represents demise. The previous is best than the latter, and that that is all we are able to say about life and demise. The animal life is the perfect there may be and higher than demise—the abnormal is probably the most extraordinary.
Critchley considers Thornton Wilder’s well-known play “Our Town,” which exalts the residing and dying of abnormal individuals, in addition to the surprise of abnormal issues. Within the play, younger Emily Gibbs has died in childbirth and awakens in an afterlife, the place she is granted her want to return to the world for a day. However when she goes again she can not stand it; individuals on earth ignore the sweetness which surrounds them. As she leaves she says goodbye to all of the abnormal issues of the world: “to clocks ticking, to meals and low, new ironed clothes and sizzling baths, and to sleeping and waking up.” It’s tragic that whereas residing we miss the fantastic thing about abnormal issues. Emily is dismayed however we’re enlightened—we ought to understand and affirm the extraordinary abnormal. Maybe that’s the finest response to nihilism—to be edified by it, to seek out which means in meaninglessness, to appreciate we are able to discover happiness regardless of nihilism.
Placing it in a different way, as I’ve written beforehand,
Nothing then utterly silences all our doubts and soothes all our worries—not the restricted which means life affords us, not the data of a objective, not the promise of hope, not the engagement in exercise. How then will we proceed? We should settle for one thing of our current life lest resentment causes us to curse it. But, on the similar time, we should reject the current or nothing will enhance. This artistic rigidity acknowledges the constraints of actuality as a place to begin whereas rebelling in opposition to its shortcomings. It entails working to mould, create, and enhance which means. We don’t know that actuality will progress, but when we partially settle for our current actuality, and if we dream of a future with out limits and battle to carry it about, then we could enhance the which means in our lives and on this planet.
But for now, we’re pressured to dwell with uncertainty and angst—that could be a testimony to our mental honesty and emotional integrity. Not like those that undertake blind religion, we scorn the facile resolutions of the fearful. And if we should die, we’ll die as free individuals who didn’t yield to the forces that sought to destroy them from the second of their start. These are the forces we search to defeat, however which haven’t but been defeated. Within the meantime, we should always relish the restricted pleasure and which means life affords, work to eradicate human limitations, and suppress adverse ideas as finest we are able to.
That is no answer, solely a solution to dwell.
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