Category: Meaning of Life
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Will Science Put Religion Out of Business? Against the Folly of Transhumanism
A correspondent writes: Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.…
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Life Without a View Other than the Immediate One
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 202: Algerians. They live in the richness and warmth of friendship and family. The body as the center, and its virtues — and its [sic] profound sadness as soon as it declines — life without a view other than the immediate one,…
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The Sense That Nothing Matters
Many are tempted by the thought that nothing ultimately matters, and in some this thought becomes an oppressive mood that paralyzes and renders life unlivable. Leo Tolstoy's "My Confession" is perhaps the best expression of this dark and oppressive nihilism. But the sense that nothing matters contains an insight which is as it were the…
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The View from Mount Zapffe: The Absurdity of Life and Intellectual Honesty
Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe: Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it…
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On ‘Making It’
One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters. He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds…
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The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates
A reader opines: I like animals because I think they're a higher form of life. They have no pretenses about what they are; a dog can achieve levels of serenity and fulfillment of which I cannot conceive by merely being a dog and doing dog things. Myself, on the other hand, I could be the…
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Why do We Obsess Over Ultimate Meaning?
Or if not literally obsess, care deeply? Karl White passes on the following from one of his correspondents: Why are we all so obsessed with infusing things with meaning anyway? Isn't this craving a mere artifact of being brought up under systems of belief that insist on the fact that life has to serve some…
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Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
To repeat some of what I wrote yesterday, According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine…
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Woody Allen on the Meaninglessness of Human Existence
Excerpts from an interview of Woody Allen by Robert E. Lauder (bolding added): RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could…
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Secular Self-Deception About the Value of Life
Here is the penultimate paragraph of John Lach's In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die (Vanderbilt UP, 1998): When the time comes [to die], we must surround ourselves with life. In a bustling hospital or a loving home, let everyone get on with their [sic] activities. …
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The Sense of Contingency and the Sense of Absurdity
The parallel is fascinating and worth exploring. According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what…
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Can Life be Meaningless but not Absurd?
Thomas Nagel suggests as much at the end of Chapter 10, "The Meaning of Life," of his little introductory text, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford UP, 1987): If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously. On the other hand, if…
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The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses
This post is a sequel to The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu. See it for bibliographical details and for background. In his essay "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel maintains that "the philosophical sense of absurdity" arises from "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which…