Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession

abstractdream wrote: Asking questions is a natural process of the mind we have been given by evolution. We evolved to wonder where the food is and what obstacles are in our way. As the modern world eliminates the minute by minute focus on survival, the falling away of objective struggle gives us time to either build on our own subjective struggle or focus on different questions. Letting go of the falsities of the river of words that swirl around in our heads is the only way to gain the focus needed to see which is which.  The relative comfort of modern life gives us the opportunity to expand and expound on questions. We seek answers from where we feel the best answers will come but in the end, the answers we give ourselves are the most profound.  I went through the process. I began with faith and felt there had to be more. I questioned and realized faith was taught to me, as I truly had none. I realized meaning was illusion and immediately fixated on death. Even with that dawning of infinity, I never had even an inkling of desire to end my own life.  At some point I understood that my existence would be what I made it. Having been born with a desire to live, I began assigning my own meaning to life. Once I did that, realizing that what I willed could actually be, I focused on being happy.

I'm reminded by your post of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" in which he says that a man can endure any "how" if he has a reason "why."  Not sure what in your post triggered that, but there it is.

I do think that it is impossible to sustain life without a drive to do so, as it is pretty obvious that forms of life without the drive to procreate would be at a severe disadvantage and probably die out pretty quickly.  Perhaps the very definition of life is something that has a drive to grow and reproduce itself.    Interesting.

In any case, the need to explain life comes from the use of language, I think.  Richard Weaver talks about "God and Devil" terms, as does Kenneth Burke (though they use the concepts in different ways, I might add).  Both though, understand that language has hierarchical valuations with concepts attached to some words having more impact and others less.  In the end I think, since we have a desire to continue we may use language to align the "god terms" with ourselves and the "devil terms" more with our enemies...thus creating a narrative of the hero where we are the main character.   Weaver's book, "Ideas Have Consequences" is a short and easy read, btw.

When I was a younger man (some would say when I was a young man but I prefer 'younger;), I thought about the drive to continue.  We do so through procreation but we also want our actual self to continue.  Genes are fine and we will settle biologically if we must, but most we do wish to do more than procreate, so that we, the individual me, is remembered.  I wonder if that comes out of language too.

As for faith, I would argue that you still have it for the beginning of faith is faith in yourself, that you are sane and sensible and thus that it is sane and sensible to put your faith in something.  Once you have faith in yourself you can truly explore all sorts of dark alleys. 

I once didn't have faith in myself.  For a couple years of my life things were pretty dark.  But as I healed from the trauma I found I became a much more grateful for the things I have and less desirous of that which I merely dreamed of having.  

Well, sorry, I'm rambling a bit here, so I'll stop.  Tomorrow I'll explore the relationship between language and meaning I think. 

AJ

Smart rationalists believe in God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager 

I know. I just couldn't resist to post. 

ajqtrz wrote: Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession For Angrim

might i inquire in what sense this is "for" me?

A short note regarding the desire of meaning.  That we can predict things is related to our ability to project.  I predict a car is going to crash into a wall as it passes because I can project it's future path leads to the wall.  I project that my watch will stop ticking because I know that the energy used to keep it going is finite and time is not.  We project into space and time, but also in ideas.  We think about power.  Then we think about a more powerful person, and a more powerful person than that, and then a more powerful person that than, and so on....until we stop.  Why do we stop?  Have we hit a wall?  No, we have recognized that our imaginations can conceive of a regression so complete that it has no end.   Thus, in my mind, one of tools by which we stop the infinite regressions into which we could fall, is to have what I call "capping words"  by which we signal that the projection has no ending point.  "Infinite" is one word.  "God" and "Devil" may be capping words for "good" and "evil."  The necessity of having capping words is obvious to anyone who has ever entered into those endless chains of thought you come across when you are a kid.

One of the problems for those who take meaning seriously (or who wish for eternal significance) is that they know that they cannot peek into eternity because they are finite, and thus have no certainty that what they think will last will really last.  Or perhaps another way of stating it is that they long to experience the eternal in the finite.  There is a book by a famous religious professor who makes the distinction that the religious person tends to see their experiences as eternal while the secular sees them as limited to the here and now.  Or as he puts it, "the eternal is collapsed by the religious person into the finite". 

In any case, I would suggest that the search of meaning reflects either the individuals ability to tolerate temporal ambiguity or the the desire to close open ended questions.

AJ