disenchantedbunny.

This post is opening up, becoming lost in terminology and trendy language, in an attempt to show where my concerns lie. Why I bother opening my mind each day and the meaning of my life. Questions that give me meaning in my asking them and yet ultimately make me concede defeat.

The second question that I posed in my last blog was discarded rather gratuitously. To say that atheism does not entail any position on morality prevents progress on the important question: (even if and especially if we find our own lives meaningful - ) How do we bring meaning to the lives of those who feel as if they have no meaning? This can in turn be taken in two ways: How can we qua individuals bring meaning to another’s life? - Or the question which I feel is more important: How can we make others realise that their lives are meaningful?

Whether or not you are inclined towards an objective morality the problem is clearly a social one. The breaking down of spatial and temporal relations due to the rapid increase in technological advances leads to not only the pluralisation of culture but the pluralisation of meanings. To say that the meaning of Greek philosophy was to examine the self and discover the nature of the world (Platonic or non-Platonic) is uncontroversial. To say that the meaning of the Renaissance was to rebel against dogmatic religious and philosophic doctrines is equally so. But the western person of today is plagued by multiple systems of meaning, each offering its own potential truths and potential falsities, forever offering improvements on potential certainties and forever recognizing their impossibility: the world of the every-day exists as a site of constant realignment. The tag ‘information society’ is understood by the sheer scope of what we can and cannot believe. Assume that bringing meaning to our lives is like writing an essay. We are given the potential sources for our essays but not the knowledge as to which to reference and and which to ignore, with no time to include a comprehensive comparison of them all. Never before have so many arguments existed in the same place; to survey them all would be futile, to judge them all would be arrogant and naive.

The question then becomes one of how to make another person’s life meaningful (or one’s own, something I have never had to deal with) when the available options for the subject to choose from are almost endless within the period of any given lifetime. If someone only sees the end, how can we make them see the inevitable beginning? And if one is to see only beginnings, how can we show them the temporal nature of their aims? How can people live and give meaning to their lives, but at the same time find collective meaning in subjective analysis?

In my brief existence I have had to learn just how temporary these brief connections with each other are. People who I love more than anything have tried to destroy themselves with blades, nails and ropes. My world has been moved by these people despite my will to keep them around. People who I once worked closely with are dead due such actions. Others are merely changed, forever scarred physically and emotionally.

To some this might be a never-ending defeat (like Camus), but for myself in this moment, like many other moments in the last three years, this is an area that drastically needs my systematic and analytic deconstruction - even if all I can manage at the moment is a brief intoxicated summary of what’s been said before.

Next year, in my honours year, I believe I should be directing philosophy towards areas applicable to real-life. Making sense of the shit that I just dribbled.