Wednesday, December 25, 2013

meaningless

who says that life is a pendulum that swings between misery and boredom. We experience some anxiety or inconvenience, strive to overcome it, feel momentary relief as it vanishes, then forget to feel relieved and relapse into boredom. And if this is true, then we had better accept ‘unheroic nihilism’ as the truth about the human condition: that life is bound to be unsatisfactory to an intelligent person because it is meaningless.

 intellectual workers’ – find normal human existence boring because they long for a more meaningful kind of existence. “We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and to emancipate ourselves from…necessities. At last it becomes a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not definitely emerged from the waters, and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.” In other words, we want a new kind of freedom, which no animal has ever known.

I begin by considering the ‘world rejection’ of Socrates, who tells his followers that since the philosopher spends his life trying to separate his soul from his body, his own death should be regarded as a consummation. This is consistent with his belief that only spirit is real, and matter is somehow unimportant and unreal. This notion would persist throughout the next two thousand years, harmonising comfortably with the Christian view that this world is unimportant compared to the next.

When man is born, his mind is like a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Everything he then learns arises from things that happen to him. So what we call the mind – all our thoughts, responses, reactions – is a ‘construct’, like a house built of pieces of Lego.







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