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Showing posts with label existentialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label existentialism. Show all posts

Age of Enlightenment

Posted by moses @ 16:45 • , , , • 0 comments


Some people claim to appreciate creation, but they don't seem to grasp just how vast the universe is. 

Our awesome sun, the local star, is about as large as 1.3 million Earths. There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. There are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 

Is it likely that amidst all of this, we are the only sapient beings to have ever graced the universe? Isn't it simply cosmic arrogance to assume that there's one creator who made all of this just for us? That this creator babysits us and personally tends to our every need? And that he has an enemy, an antithesis, who attacks us personally? 

 I think that's a laugh. 

That is not to say that secular thought escapes this problem. Since the Enlightenment, secularism is still plagued with the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of all life, which has partly resulted in our modern psychology of extreme socioeconomic (and sociopathic) narcissism.

How I wish I lived a thousand or a few thousand years from now, when we have finally learned that such thinking is folly—when we have discovered greater secrets of the universe that allows us to grasp, once and for all, that it is false. That spirit of discovery, the willingness to learn things that are beyond the scope of our everyday lives, would seem to be both the proper spiritual and scientific attitude.

Is that even conceivable to those for whom the End is always nigh? To even speak of a thousand years from now in front of some would appear to be heresy. As heliocentrism perhaps was a long time ago in an age far, far away.

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Posted by moses @ 12:33 • , , , • 0 comments


I don't know if this has specifically been addressed by someone before, but one dimension to the existential problem is banality of existence. There is a kind of abstract meaninglessness that people like Camus have written about, but there's also a very practical sense of the banality that most of us are, from time to time, conscious of. In short: How do we live a life where we know that the world is so full wrongs and that we are, by and large, powerless to change it?

We live our lives day to day seeking our own happiness as though it carries a deep meaning. We suffer for the most trivial things, and we are put through all kinds of absurdity in order to buy ourselves some comfort in which we can pass our days. We lose, we gain; and after time has had its way, every joy or pain loses its significance. We live in bubbles, painfully focused on the minutiae of our lives but often unaware of the larger things going on around us.

And for our entertainment, we often watch others pass the same banal lives—characters on screens or on pages looking for happiness and revelling in frivolity. Or if we seek an escape, a fantasy, we try to lose ourselves in a world where individuals have power and could shape the world around them; and sometimes this only reminds us of just how unremarkable our own existence is.

Then there's religion or faith. But all it tells us is that, yes, we're powerless, that ultimately we need to depend on a greater power. It only gives an answer to the problem by affirming it and denying that we there is anything we can do on our own.

So how do we do it? How do most of us go about living our daily lives willy-nilly? It's strange, even fascinating. 

Perhaps that is the miracle of life.