Day 6:
It is one of my core ideas, beliefs if
I have to use that word, that there is no inherent meaning which
pre-exists the individual instances which make up existence. This is
an extension of the existence precedes essence of traditional
existentialism. I say an extension because in most cases this was
thought to be a unique aspect of human Being, whereas I take it to
extend not only to the human condition but to the Being of all
things. There is a ling which I have long thought I stole from Kurt
Vonnegut but have never been able to pin down exactly where he said
it, “All people, places, and events, real or imagined are purely
coincidental.” I always took this to be his spin on the standard
disclaimer at the beginning of many books regarding resemblances
within the work, but also a profound truth about the universe.
Another line of Vonnegut, this one I am sure is his, is “in the
beginning was the thing and one thing led to another.” These two
concepts I take as founding ideas of my understanding of the
profoundly absurd meaninglessness of the universe around us. There
was a state of affairs which came into being at the first moments of
the universe, it could have been any of an infinite number of
circumstances, and over the course of infinite time it has and will
be all of them, but this one was such that it brought about the
universe as it is today, and another circumstance would have brought
about a profoundly different universe or no universe at all. It seems
miraculous that things worked out so perfectly to create this
universe but it only seems that way in retrospect, essentially the
Goldilocks theory, that had things been different either no
intelligence would have arisen to notice, or a different intelligence
would have arisen equally resultant from the unique conditions of the
universe in which it exists and equally amazed at how perfectly the
universe was tuned so as to create it. A mistaking of cause and
effect.
Taking this purely random universe as
our starting point we have to ask ourselves how to live in such a
universe. So much previous philosophy existed in the inaccurate
belief in an inherently meaningful universe and sought to find the
meaning inherent in the universe. Now that we realize the meaningless
nature of the universe we can recognize the profound mistake in this
approach, searching ceaselessly for that which never existed in the
first place. What no one realized for centuries was that the real
project of religion was not the revelation of meaning but the
creation of meaning. Because we mistakenly thought that meaning which
we were creating was meaning discovered we took it as absolute and
unquestionable rather than the socially constructed meaning it was,
revealed absolute meaning cannot be changed or questioned, but
socially created meaning is always subject to social amendment. If
the meaning we are using is not providing the outcomes we desire it
is entirely within our power and right, but also responsibility to
create new different and better concepts of meaning. It becomes the
primary act of living to create the meaning of the life lived.
The other part of this is in the
creation of meaning not only in our lives but in our understanding of
the world around us. Our understanding of what makes up our reality
and what value to place on the objects and events which surround
us... This will be the subject of tomorrows 500 or so words...
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