Life, the Universe, and Everything

Blogs are great because they are a mixture of the mundane, trivial, poignant and tragic. They are eavesdropping on diaries and scrapbooks, but also include things you would never include in either. I'm sure graduate students everywhere are creating dissertations on blogs. (Do they have a companion blog?)

I do think everyone needs to blog at some point their own metaphysics. At least, that's something I'm interested in reading more about from others. So I'll get it started:

I listened to a podcast yesterday that was a reading of Shopenhauer's "Emptiness of Existence." It's the best explanation you'll ever hear about the apparent meaninglessness of life. The worst possible fate, he says, is to be born. And the second worst fate is to live long. Oddly enough, it's not pessimism, per se. It's just matter-of-fact rationalism: We are awakened from a deep sleep, get very excited and dreamy in our youth, then experience years of unrealized and unsatisfied expectations before dying again. It's like coming up for air, only to sink again and drown.

It's sort of like Ecclesiastes, but without the joy of eating, drinking, and being merry. And without someone tacking on the existence of God at the end.

I can't argue rationally with Shopenhauer's assessment. On the face of it, space is very deep and people are very small. But I don't think people are, at heart, merely rational creatures, so I don't see why I need to pretend to be one and get sucked into the Shopenhauer abyss.

Here's where I think meaning comes from: Because all we have in front of us is the present fleeting moment, life satisfaction really can only come from building a story. Creating a story means feeding our memory and, like all stories, having something we are driving toward: a plot. We give our life plot when we aim for things, wish for things, hope for things - do things. And along the way our story picks up characters, themes, settings - all the things about story you learned about in English class that T.S. Eliot categorized.

If we don't do any the above, we're really just ... there. And that accounts for Shopenhauer's view. He's very specific that there is no there, because as soon as we name the present, it is gone.

We have to be more than just ... there. We have to be a character who builds a story. There lies the meaning.

Everyone who decides to build a story is going to have a different story (those who are simply "there" have remarkably similar stories). When we learn about others' stories, we open up the possibility of making our own story richer, because we can see life more keenly. And when we intertwine our story with those of friends and family, our story becomes that much more essential.

To round out my own "big picture" metaphysics, let me say that it includes a belief in God. It comes from experiencing one, maybe two, difficult moments in my life in which I truly believed I was meeting a healing, supernatural God. It also comes from the intellectual realization that I am a happier, more peaceful and complete person when I choose to believe in God. (The best example of how this can be possible comes from an audio book I heard in which the biographies of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud are compared in detailed. Both were brilliant, admirable men. But of the two, only Lewis appears to have been - in addition to fulfilled in his career - downright happy - despite a level of tragedy and deprivation at least equal to Freud's own.)

Bottom line: There are really no intellectual arguments that necessitate the existence of God - and, boy, I looked at most all of them in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (two semesters of the latter) as well as Christian apologetics and teaching. It really is curious to ponder why a God might not want to place any direct evidence of his/her own existence in plain sight of ALL human beings. We can debate the miraculous matters in the Bible and even the import of the Bible itself. But when one is talking rationality, one must consider the God-given wisdom of: "Don't believe everything you read in a book." Remember, I'm not talking about impressionistic or revelatory experiences of God, which may be found in stories written down or experienced by those who read scripture (or even those who don't). I'm talking about rational proof here, and I just don't see it. But I believe!

Just because something doesn't have a Newtonian or Einsteinian law to support it, doesn't mean we shouldn't believe in it or do it. There's more to my metaphysics than rational argument. What about yours?