Original in Swedish: Första tesen om existentialistiska mannen Del 1/3
- Oliver Kuivasto
A bonfire ballad for the man who surely has a straw of temper down his throat.
Whether a man can see,
there must be nothing beyond it,
and besides everything, he shall abandon thee
to achieve his change in bits.
Nor can he make a claim,
to have achieved something without giving in,
to the exploration of life and its existence in flame,
after all, was it not what the eternal wills?
From now on, he should bind to complete himself,
so that no one else can depict things for him.
Finally, the existence in you is like me,
subjective as long as a man cannot break down with his bare hands a fifty kilogram stone.
Introduction
From wherein does it stem that the intellectual Man cannot stop thinking? What can completely affect, occupy, and own the soul of a Man? This terrible affecting and completeness of it is the miserable truth. In all this, the only definitive explanation is that the man is "the existentialist man." I have no more words for this paragraph. Enjoy dwelling in nothingness!
The meaningless life
20th-century existentialist and the leading figure of French philosophy and existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre expresses the perspective and meaninglessness of life as the following in his masterpiece:
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
Imagine what mockery it would be if you could never distinguish and depict yourself
separate from reality. Imagine that you lived as one of many. One of the hundreds of pigs in the slaughterhouse, one of the millions of pitiful insects with a lifespan of no more than a few weeks, one of the billions of plants and threes that are waiting to be felled and killed by the greedy human race, or one of the endless atoms that science claims to be our building blocks. Oh, how pathetic. Alas, this is not what human life is worth. We humans by birth are worth even less than the pigs in the slaughterhouse, or the pathetic insects, the trees, or the atoms. Alas, dear reader, you heard just right. The fact is that we are not worthy at all at our birth; we are worth nothing. We are worth absolutely nothing, our existence (as purpose) is not in us at our birth, it is imminent but not evident. There is no reality to separate from in the first place, but after all, you are one with reality.
A philosophical man could go as far as to claim that we are simply Tabula Rasa at birth. Let us not conclude that knowledge derives solely from empirical methods as the famous empiricist John Locke concluded with the concept Tabula Rasa. Instead, let us follow the question Aristotle presented to us concerning the human mind:
“…when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought?” - De Anima, Aristotle
With these words let us formulate our line of thought and investigate the question; What is life, and how come it is meaningless?
To get started with our inquiry, let's first look at reality from both a monist and dualist perspective. The first level or the only one (for a monistic interpretation of the world) is the physical reality, or commonly known as the material world. That is everything that can be concluded from the description of matter, i.e., substances. For Aristotle, a ball was just a ball in its essence and nothing more. In case the ball was no longer round, it had lost its character and therefore the ball was no longer in its essence a ball. This can also be linked to the concept of what is good, because a ball that has its essence is always good and just for its purpose, while the ball that has lost its purpose is no longer "a good ball." - it has lost its fundamental nature. For a monist or materialist, our idea about the ball, i.e. our consciousness of the ball's existence is part of reality, which has a basis in either an a priori of the origin of all materia or that simply substances in the same manner as reality exists independently from Man. An idealist or dualist would instead separate the very idea or thought of the ball from its existence. Nowadays, an additional dimension of reality is usually enumerated, that is a social or societal dimension, that is the human interaction and cooperation with others. Oh, the majestic intersubjectivity.
In order to understand the difference between the different conceptions of the nature of reality and to avoid prolonged metaphysical or ontological preachment, and to be able to answer the question of the origin of the meaningless life, let us examine Man as the figure of reality. Let us divide Man into two. First, the body; our material possession, and second, the mind; our inner mediator, the source of reason, the center of judgment. What is the connection between these two divided parts? Is it anything other than that they are both inside the person and are consequently independent of another person's body or soul? The fact is that it does not affect our question of whether we take a monist or dualist stance on the relationship between the human mind and body. Rather, what should in fact intrigue and strongly cause fascination for us curious humanists is the knowledge that our body and mind are independent of the body and mind of others. Perhaps it is easier to imagine through a dialogue similar to the one that Plato uses effectively in The Republic. Let us imagine that Sartre has a conversation with God, sounds reasonable, right😉.
- Is it the body or the mind that controls our interpretation of the world? God asked nicely with a tone of respect.
- The body is only us experiencing the rational interpretation of our mind and our tool to know and act in the world according to our interpretation. The mind is the center of our perception of reality and the world. Alas, how does this matter anyhow, Sartre followed.
- Is our mind dependent on any whole, any absolute?
- Absolutely not. We all experience the world differently. That is the beauty in it, that we are all independent and subjective beings.
- How do you then explain social norms, friendship, and our compassionate actions with other people?
- Man lies to himself. It is one of the worst sins a man can and keeps committing. To avoid taking responsibility for our own lives is exactly why we try to cling to other people's lives and follow other people's worldviews and advice in life.
- Is there an objective reality?
- Impossible, if a man is a subjective being and is recognized to know, experience, think, and interpret everything subjectively then reality cannot be one either, rather it is subjective like the human being, that is it is different for every human being.
The only thing we can agree on is that life is meaningless. This is definitely one of the greatest paradoxes in life. By perceiving life as subjective, we simply object to the idea that life is (objectively) meaningless (for the very objectivity of life is in the subjective), but by perceiving that life is not objective, but rather subjective, we arrive at the truth that life cannot have a universal meaning, that is life must be meaningless. Simplified, the so-called "meaning of life" does not exist, but really it does exist, just not in its essence, so we have to find, or rather make it first.
O.K
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