The Elusive Meaning of Life
August 29th, 2011 - 1:53 pm
At Asia Times Online: “Why you won’t find the meaning of life.” The problem is that you’re looking for it. That’s what happens when you spend Sunday watching the Weather Channel.
‘For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be.’
I find it quite revealing that in your preaching on the futility of searching for the meaning to life that you never once mentioned the God of Abraham,Issac and Jacob once,not once.
Like Moses and the many others who searched and found the purpose,had all very satisfying and full lives.
Maybe the fact that you follow a collection of dead end philosophers is why you have surrendered in defeat instead of looking and keep on looking until you find ?
‘Professing to be wise,they became fools’
“Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.”
Matthew 15:14
Marcel,
I wrote in the present essay, “There are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia and have every hope of enduring for millennia still.” What did you think I was talking about?
Thank you for taking the time to write this essay. And please don’t get worked up by comments like Marcel’s. The bigger the readership, the greater the number of fools reading.
‘There are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia’
Basket weaving ?
Your vagueness was profound.
Actually it is your lack of reading comprehension that I find profound.
Marcel should hit the ‘delete’ or ‘esc’ button immediately before submitting his posts.
at some point in my transition from student to worker, I settled on “being useful, and helpful” to the extent that I could. Having lost formal participation in the workforce more than ten years ago, and having since been rejected for even formal volunteer activities, I took a break from The Weather Channel when the rain finally stopped yesterday. My sole goal was to collect the fallen branches and check my downspouts before the winds came.
Then I discovered a big chunk of a big sugar maple had been partially sheared and was blocking my one-block street so that the four neighbors to my south could not drive out. I reverted to my Scout-like “be helpful” persona. Asked the neighbor if she had reported the damage. Yes, she had, and some day the village would come to remove the twelve inch tree limb. I offered any help, something this neighbor has never considered while watching me shovel snow from my driveway.
While I was assessing the damage to the sugar maple on my SE corner from her damage, another neighbor tried to drive through in his pick-up truck. I had to pull the mess away for him, and got a tip of the hat.
Then I reverted to full-blown “be helpful”, to prune away the smaller branches in order to allow everyone south of me to be able to drive through until the village remembered to come deal with the total problem. With my torn rotator cuff. I realized I was being too-neighborly, but it is my persona.
Then a third Southern neighbor walked by and mentioned he would use his chain saw in a day or two, but at least understood all I was doing was trimming enough for a pick-up truck to pass. Then the husband of the damaged-tree house opened his front door and chastised me for (in his stupidity) trying to clear the entire mess, and that he would come out with his chain saw the next day or so. I explained I was just cutting enough so that the truck could return home.
Two men with chainsaws and two other men in pick-up trucks never thought to come out and help me make THEIR lives easier.
Reminded me of the “be helpful” days when I lived in the Bronx (where I wound up after my career ended) and the drunk of a super refused to shovel the snow on our sidewalk. Being the only person with a snow shovel, I cleared the snow so that people would not slip when it turned to ice. The building president saw me and demanded that I stop in case of a liability lawsuit. I ignored him.
Anyway, after my bit of tree pruning, and collecting all the down debris around my house, I became so depressed at the absence of common sense neighborliness that I almost, again, wanted to die. (It is usually a daily descent, but worse when my being useful is specifically condemned/rejected)
It seems “be useful” is no longer enough when it seems everyone around me tries to stop me from being useful.
Thanks for lettting me post this. I am still so depressed about this that I seeno point in ever thinking about the meaning of life. I wish I were someone’s adored dog instead of a human in this version of America.
At least our postal carrier will think I was sane to be useful when she drives through that passage today.
And thank you for helping your neighbors. Just because they didn’t thank you doesn’t mean they didn’t notice your efforts, or that they won’t feel stupid when they realize that they failed to help in a time of need.
Thank you Stephen – but the point of my frustration was being CRITICIZED for being useful, again. I do not expect thanks, or acknowledgment from anyone when I do something that is useful to others. My meaning of life.
I decided today, when I went back out to trim a bit more for the height of the mail Jeep, saw a very large heavy dangerous dangling limb, and managed to get it down without self-injury, that the problem is nanny-state passivity, e.g., “Wait for the village to take care of it.” This is western Massachusetts.
Our mail carrier enjoyed the story after she transited the safe passage I had created.
I have never lived anywhere with such thoughtless neighbors, professing to be caring liberals.
And here I was thinking that life was an adventure that included pot-roasts.
The smell of a pot roast cooking is sufficient stimulus to me to get me out of my bed/chair and away from the Weather Channel. Where there is pot roast, there is hope. It is the physical manifestation of civilization, and shows man’s gifts and his desires {as well as his dominion over the earth) all at once.
Pot roast is yet another sign that God loves us, and wants us to be happy. As are children, which brings us right back around to our point. If you don’t think that God loves us and wants us to be happy, why have children?
Res ipsa loquitur.
I enjoyed your article. I find it unfortunate, however, that it is only Heidegger’s flirtation with Nazi ideology that you mentioned. I see Heidegger’s early 1930s acceptance of Nazi ideology much the way I see many intellectuals today accepting Obama’s ideology. There are fashions and fashionable people that even seemingly well-educated people accept and then discard, the way people are now beginning to discard Obama’s ideology and persona. Heidegger was an extremely naive academic at the time, and was unfortunately too ambitious when he was selected as Rector of a university, imagining (quite wrongly as it turned out) that he could somehow influence Nazi officialdom.
Heidegger’s work influenced his pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer has written probably the best defence of tradition in the past 200 years in his “Truth and Method” and other writings. He certainly gives the best explanation of how bourgeois society (at least in the past) has been able to transmit its traditions through the educational process he calls “bildung.”
Gloria,
Heidegger was a brilliant philosopher, whose contribution was to portray Kierkegaard’s concept of Angst in the confrontation with mortality in purely secular terms; the resulting defense of non-Being puts him in the same position of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who rails against “this squalid world” in vain, but nonetheless promotes violence and perversion in his war against Being. To my mind the clearest interpreter of Heidegger is the Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod (see The Body of Faith as well as his little book on Heidegger and Kierkegaard). Heidegger didn’t just flirt with Nazism, although he was not a typical Nazi (his published works contain no anti-Semitism, for example, although he made anti-Semitic comments in private correspondence). He never apologized for his party membership and never publicly repudiated Hitler.
I edited a brief article on Heidegger by Wyschogrod at First Things:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/heideggerrsquos-tragedy
I prefer a mixture of Aristotle’s outline of man’s search for knowledge, and Camus’ Sisyphus acceptance of reality.
Can anyone not see why the West is in such serious decline and the darkness that is Islam is so easily making dangerous and destructive inroads into what was once a beacon of light and truth ?
The Walls that once protected our Judeo-Christian culture have been torn down and replaced with cardboard whitewashed with flammable lies.
It’s all going to burn,in fact the fire’s already started.
Could one argue that the Ashari viewpoint described in this article is another form of existentialism, and equally self-defeating?
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Few people speak anymore of the great philosopher of her generation, the great Ain’t Be, of the old Andy Griffith Show.
“That cain’t be, Ain’t Be?!!
Excellent.
While not a particularly religious person myself (I’m a Pascal’s Wager kind of Christian) I have found that I prefer to avoid liberals and prefer the company of rednecks, Christians, observant Jews, and the basically non liberal.
They tend to be more helpful and more tolerant of my eccentricities. The academic environment tends to be full of …..well let’s just say the self inflated, irreligious for the most part, and rather unhappy. Not all of them of course but enough in the liberal arts to make me prefer to be an autodidact in that field.
Dasein is a brand of bottled water. Made by the Coca Cola company. I have a case of it on my shelf at work. I reach for one reflexively while working a problem. Am I missing something?
Oswald Spengler himself seems to have had notions of influencing or at least being tolerated by the Nazis. Didn’t he have a chat with Hitler and Goebbels in 1934 or so? As I remember, they weren’t too thrilled at his attitude to Nazism and ordered that his books could not be sold in the Third Reich. Or is that story apocryphal? Anyway, he died before he could be sent to an extermination camp.