| Phil Free:
Interestingly enough, I tried to "explain" my views on the subject of "whys" and "why nots" in the "what is your religion" thread.
Randall, you're correct, of course, assuming there is no good or evil, God or Satan (or whatever).
I personally exist in such a reality, I don't believe in Good or Evil, but I don't think stopping there and saying everything is pointless is "The Answer."
RP:
My point is that everything is essentially pointless. But unless we succumb to that in despair and commit suicide human social interaction is hardly existentially pointless. It's just that points made respecting human moral and political and aesthetic interaction are always situated and subjective and relative. There are no absolute moral perspectives sans God.
Phil Free:
Of course all that I do is pretty much pointless - I take none of it with me, no fame, no glory, nothing. But I choose not to dwell on the "end", and rather live in the now. Why? Well, "why not?" is no less a valid question.
RP:
I agree. Life is far more about living it than just thinking incessantly about what it means to live it. But the manner in which we come to grasp the relationship between being and nothingness will go a long way toward motivating us to live it this way rather than that. If you are convinced, say, there is a God and that Salvation is awaiting you if you do God's will chances are that will greatly impact the choices you make in the interim. And if you don't that has ramifications, as well. But it will always be situated differently for different people in different existential contexts. And there is no way objectively to calibrate an authentic from and inauthentic life.
Phil Free:
As for "living in the now" - I accept that there is no "one way", that all ways are the same and lead to the same thing (be it to nothingness in the big black, or for some kind of cosmic purpose that transends mere human experience) but that does not stop me from being "me" (just being!) I react as I wish to react, I think when I want to think, I cry when I want to cry, I sh*t when I have to, I eat when I'm hungry, and sleep when I'm tired.
I go to the movies, I wash my clothes, I debate - I philosophise. All for nothing? Maybe, but I do because doing comes natural to me.
That is being Authentic. Yes, I believe one can be Authentic, but only when they have realized what you have realised, and many before and after you have and will have realised - that all worth and value is subjective.
RP:
If you wish to call this Authentic so be it. I think it is just a particular self-delusion that you embrace now, today. So many conflicting and contradictory existential variables come together to create any particular persona at any particular existential junture "I" is always a work in progress that, given a particularly jolting circumstanital landslide, can utterly reconfigure the way you understand yourself and the world around you. If the man I was before going over to Vietnam met the man I was after coming back home they would not even recognize each other if they collided on the street. You can be "honest" and "sincere" about the role subjectivity plays in all this but it doesn't really change how precarious and problematic human identity always is. And the value of that "authentic" approach to life is no more or less relevant when the Grim Reaper comes around. Death and oblivion don't give a crap about things like that at all.
Randall Patrick |