My plan here, of course, is to try to establish a foundation of what I believe, and then build up from it. I find that not only am I writing about these things, but I'm building as I go out the disjointed ideas floating around in my head, trying to anchor them into a solid and cohesive structure. The structure begins with establishing that the world exists, not as an assumption or as a persuasive philosophical argument, but as a solid thing as real as the desktop that my elbow is resting on. I established this on the grounds of inescapably. The world holds me here. I am forced to deal with it. If I touch a hot stove, it will burn me. If I run out in front of a semi truck, it will kill me. In light of this, the question of its "realness" becomes negligible. It is real in every way that matters to me. A hot stove that burns you is as real as it gets. Seeking confirmation beyond that leads off into a realm of abstract pointlessness. Any world where stoves burn you and semis flatten you has to be taken seriously.
In addition to establishing the world, I also sought to establish its objective nature as a world that exists beyond me, beyond my mind and my ideas about it, and beyond anyone else's mind and ideas about it. I began with the world as I see and understand it from my immediate perspective, and I worked outward from there to the things that I've been told about the world and that I take with a certain grain of faith in the honesty and accuracy of my fellow human beings. I took these things as the foundation of what I "know" about the world while at the same time trying to establish how the world demonstrates and proves its objectivity in my most immediate experiences. In other words, although my knowledge of the world may have to extend to the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th hand, the foundation that this knowledge is of an objective, external reality is immediately available to me, right before my very eyes. I stumble across the stove unaware, and it burns me before I even have time to know that it's hot. It informs me of its hotness by burning me, in fact. How can I doubt that the stove was sitting there hot all along, before I came into the room? Doubting the objective reality of a world where hot stoves can take you by surprise is just as pointless as trying to doubt the reality of the stove in the first place. Whether the stove was objectively sitting there hot for six hours or whether it wasn't hot until my hand made subjective contact with it, it burns me unsuspectingly all the same. When I arrive on the scene, the air is heated, the gas meter shows six hours of use and so on. Vincent can entertain the notion that my appliances were having a tea party or that my kitchen was a non-existent void before I walked in, if he enjoys that sort of thing, but where does this idea really go? Every second of the day the world presents me with a reality that shows every sign of persistence, continuity, and an existence apart from me and beyond me. Whether this is a matter of fact or appearance, it's all the same. These are terms on which I'm forced to deal with the world.
So now, having established the world (at least to my satisfaction), I figured that the next step would be to move on to meaning. In other words, having established that the world is here and that I'm in it, what value am I to find in this fact? What am I to make of this existence? What do I do now? (And by "meaning", I don't necessarily mean that I'm trying to establish a theory of the meaning of life, but rather establish that life can have intrinsic meaning without going beyond it.)
My plan was to begin with the hypothesis that possibly the world wasn't designed according to a divine plan for some higher purpose, that it simply came into being on its own somehow, as a fulfillment of physical law and nothing else. Following that logic, then life would also have only come into being by physical law and chemical reaction, and it would have evolved by natural selection, and there would be no greater meaning to it than that. From there I would pull our existence back from the brink of nihilism, and turn it around to the open landscape of freedom. I would show that a prior justification for life would be like the strings attached to the gift; it would pre-define my role; it would determine the "thing I was here to do." A universe without a plan is wide open. An existence without prior justification lends itself to unlimited and wonderful possibility. We can decide individually and together what purpose to put all of this to. That's the beauty of it. We're here, the world is here, and we can count our blessings and make the most of our good fortune. We can find meaning for the world and our existence in it.
In such a case, life would be its own justification. It would be an incredible gift given by the cold mechanisms of the cosmos, and the only stipulation would be the simple stipulation that comes with any gift. Make the most of it. Appreciate it while it lasts. And if we defaulted on that stipulation we'd have no one to answer to but ourselves, and our own disappointment. To look for prior justification would be like saying that life by itself isn't good enough. There must be some reason, some excuse for it. Well, religion is always ready to provide those excuses.
Religion postulates a justification for life that lies beyond it. They give it names like Heaven or Nirvana or Shangri-la, but it all amounts to the same thing, a reason for life. The problem is that when someone invests in one of these reasons, they kind of poke a hole in their life and let all the air flow out of it into this reason. In seeking a justification for life, they surrender its free possibilities. In the interest of comfort, they tie puppet strings to themselves and hope someone's holding the stick at the other end. Rather than embracing life, and embracing the world, they try to see if they can cash it in for something better. The more they invest in this excuse, the more air they let out of their life. On the one hand, you have people who go to church on a holiday here and there, letting little squirts of air out now and then, treating religion like an existential insurance policy. "What's the harm?", they say, but little by little the joy of a life unto itself slowly slips away from them. On the other hand, you have the monk in the monastery who has let all of the air that he possibly can out of his life. He curls up in a corner, retreating from the world as much as he can, waiting and waiting until he can slip through that crack and into his blissful eternity. Then you have all the degrees in between, and what a tragedy it would all be if these excuses were nothing but fantasies. The possibilities of life wasted for nothing.
But I wouldn't end it there, because maybe, just maybe, there's another kind of monk. This monk hasn't let the air out of his life. Instead, he holds Heaven in his heart, here in the world, and life and the trees and the birds...all of that is all the more beautiful to him for it. By some fortuitous naivete' he has either missed the point of religion entirely, or he has grasped some profound truth about it that has eluded everyone else. He doesn't yearn for Heaven, but rather for the world. It isn't that life isn't enough for him. It's more like life is just too much for him to contain. His love for it is like a river overflowing it's banks. He gropes for it in confusion, and in this confusion Heaven takes a place in his heart and his mind as a way of coming to grips with it, of giving it a name and a face. Heaven is really his love for the world. Now certainly, there must be some believers like that. I know I've met more than a few, and you can always tell the difference.
So, that's the direction I was going to go in, but I found myself struggling with it...emotionally. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's because it all rests on a hypothesis: the absence of God. I do stand by the ideas, and I do think they need to be said, and I realize now that I just said them (maybe I'll leave that up to Vincent and his editing.), but I think it all starts off from the wrong point. Here I've been, trying to establish existence, gaining ground inch by inch, and suddenly I'm off speculating at the beginning of time. It's a jolting break. I need to proceed as I have, beginning with the solid foundation of my own immediate existence and working from there, building on that. I can't build an idea of meaning that's contingent on possibilities that I don't know and can't possibly know. Like existence, my struggle for meaning has to start here with me. It has to build on what I do know, and can know. It has to grow out of the world as I find it, not as I might imagine it to be.
