I can relate to this, from James Park
Sometimes we find ourselves set at a distance
from the world of our daily concerns.
We begin to see the familiar as if it were new and strange.
We may seem to be wandering in a foreign land.
We notice things in a new light:
What are all these people so busy doing?
Where are they going in such a hurry?
Do they ever notice the ridiculousness of their behavior?
Why do they regard their activities as valuable and important?
What difference would it make if this day had not happened?
Sometimes the world seems like a colony of ants,
each individual endlessly repeating his behavior until he dies.
No one asks about the ultimate meaning.
Each merely continues faithfully to fulfill his little function.
Would it be so great a loss (and a loss to whom)
if the whole ant colony were wiped out in an instant
—like a distant city of which we have never heard
being swallowed up by the earth?
What is a city for, anyway?
It is a cluster of buildings where people live and reproduce.
They hold jobs and live off one another.
But is it not circular, adding up to precisely zero in the end?
“ 1. The quality of being futile; triflingness, want of weight or importance; esp. inadequacy to produce a result or bring about a required end, ineffectiveness, uselessness. “
(OED)
I think I must be bucking the trend ….
“People are most likely to become depressed in middle age, according to a worldwide study of happiness. The team of economists leading the work found that we are happiest towards the beginning and end of our lives, leaving us most miserable in middle years between 40 and 50.
The results, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, showed that people’s levels of happiness followed a U-shaped curve, a pattern that was remarkably consistent in the vast majority of countries the researchers looked at, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe.
For both men and women in the UK, the probability of depression peaked at around the age of 44. In the US, men were most likely to be unhappiest at 50, while for women the age was 40.
…. the signs of mid-life depression were consistent across many groups of people, irrespective of socio-economic status, whether they had children in the house, were divorced, or were facing changes in jobs or income.
“What causes this apparently U-shaped curve, and its similar shape in different parts of the developed and even often developing world, is unknown. However, one possibility is that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations. Another possibility is that cheerful people live systematically longer.”
“It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans. For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old. Perhaps realising that such feelings are completely normal in mid-life might even help individuals survive this phase better.”
From the Guardian
Just been re-reading the Ten Commandments.
I mean, what is that all about? They’re all so, like, negative.
How about we update them for the 21st century? Oh, and write them as permissions or suggestions, rather than commandments… and maybe not have ten, ‘cos it’s too much of a nice round number and nothing in life is that neat.
Let me see…
You can:
-
feel all your feelings; they are all good.
-
use all your faculties and aptitudes to the full.
-
strive to become everything that you are capable of being.
-
think; but remember that there’s no way the human brain can understand every little thing in this enormous universe.
-
do whatever doesn’t harm another animate or inanimate part of creation.
-
stay in touch with the Earth and the creatures on it, including humans.
You might find it useful to:
-
regularly recall the tinyness of your existence and the shortnss of your lifetime when set aganist the enormity of the universe; bear this in mind as you do 1 – 6.
-
treat others as you would like them to treat you.
Any more?
Reading an article by Paul B. Lieberman and Leston L. Havens about Existential Psychotherapy, based upon the ideas of Heidegger, I came across some interesting observations.
“Actions… embody interpretations of self and world. Actions show what matters to us and what we want. It is not only that we betray ourselves by minor movements or habits, as Freud said, but that, most fundamentally, our natures appear through our comportment (actions). This forward-moving, embodied expression of our self-interpretation Heidegger called existence.
“For Freud, … the essence of neurotic functioning is failure to acknowledge and appropriately express one’s feelings, wishes, or impulses… the acknowledgment of one’s constitutional or socially created drives or wishes is the key to psychological health. … For Heidegger, the distinction is not between normal and neurotic, but authentic and inauthentic. Heidegger’s authenticity requires an understanding of what is essential about oneself. …
because understanding… is shown in our acts and practices (not in having true inner beliefs), authenticity is shown in styles of behavior or comportment in the world.
authenticity is not acknowledgment of … wishes or drives but an appreciation of being-in-the-world itself, since that is what human nature fundamentally is.
“In other words, authenticity requires understanding of being-in-the-world: its absorption in things that are factical (entities constituted by our culture, which are nevertheless perceived as necessary and universal).
Authenticity is shown by acting with commitment, absorption, and affectedness, despite full awareness of the contingency of the world and our interpretations. … It is part of being-in-the-world that individuals are absorbed in their involvement with people and things.“But it is always possible for such “thrownness” to lead to inauthentic “falling.” In falling, an individual is so absorbed in particular things or relationships that she loses the appropriate appreciation of human nature as being-in-the-world (as Heidegger defines it, in such terms as skillful absorption and facticity). In falling, an individual becomes overly committed to her current situation without acknowledging its contingency, the possibility of alternatives, the impossibility of proof, and the need for commitment and resolute action, despite these features.
“If authenticity means acting with commitment while also accepting anxiety in the face of human being, falling is trying to avoid anxiety by disregarding what we should appreciate fully, namely, the various aspects of being-in-the-world.
Doesn’t this idea of absorbtion in the world come very close to Csíkszentmihályi ’s concept of flow?
We humans seem to be able to cope best with things that are more or less on the same scale as ourselves.
We can understand other creatures, like animals, that we can see; but viruses, which we know exist but cannot see with the naked eye, seem hard to take seriously, until we catch a nasty one.
We can we can just about imagine what it might have been like to live in (say) medieval or Biblical times, but we just can’t begin to grasp what it means when we read that our ancestors coming along a few million years ago, or our planet having existed for billions of years before we were ever even around.
Is it the same for other sentient beings? Is this a function of being reflexive creatures with awareness?
It’s like, the further away something is from our of scale of things (in time, distance…) , the more difficulty we have in grasping it.
Wikipedia explains this by observing that:
Humans interact with their environments based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and limits.
For example:
A number of characteristic physical quantities can be associated with the human body, the human mind, and the preservation of human life.
- Distance: one to two metres (human arm’s reach, stride, height)
- Attention span: seconds to hours
- Lifespan: approximately seventy years
- Mass: kilogrammes
- Force: newtons
- Pressure: one standard atmosphere
- Temperature: around 300 K (room temperature)
Humans also interact with their environments based on their sensory capabilities. The fields of human perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact sciences, because human information processing is not a purely physical act, and because perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences, experiences, and expectations.
Many of the objects of scientific interest in the universe are much larger than human scale (stars, galaxies) or much smaller than human scale (molecules, atoms, subatomic particles).
Similarly, many time periods studied in science involve time scales much greater than human timescales (geological and cosmological time scales) or much shorter than human timescales (atomic and subatomic events).
“To turn Pascal’s wager on its head, it seems that,
when in doubt,
the best strategy is to assume that these 70 or so years are our only chance to experience the cosmos,
and we should make the fullest use of it.
For if we don’t, we might lose everything;
whereas if we are wrong and there is life beyond the grave, we lose nothing.”
(Mihály Csíkszentmihályi)
In my ongoing search for meaning, I find that Csíkszentmihályi has some fascinating things to say, based upon his concept of flow.
“When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification. In the harmonious focusing of physical and psychic energy, life finally comes into its own. It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand. Because almost any activity can produce flow provided the relevant elements are present, it is possible to improve the quality of life by making sure that clear goals, immediate feedback, skills balanced to action opportunities, and the remaining conditions of flow are as much as possible a constant part of everyday life.
However:
“If one fails to develop goals that give meaning to one’s existence, if one does not use the mind to its fullest, then good feelings fulfill just a fraction of the potential we possess. A person who achieves contentment by withdrawing from the world to “cultivate his own garden,” like Voltaire’s Candide, cannot be said to lead an excellent life.
Maybe this is where I’ve been going wrong, since:
“Without a consistent set of goals, it is difficult to develop a coherent self. It is through the patterned investment of psychic energy provided by goals that one creates order in experience. Negative emotions like sadness, fear, anxiety, or boredom produce “psychic entropy” in the mind, that is, a state in which we cannot use attention effectively to deal with external tasks, because we need it to restore an inner subjective order.
Positive emotions like happiness, strength, or alertness are states of “psychic negentropy” because we don’t need attention to ruminate and feel sorry for ourselves, and psychic energy can flow freely into whatever thought or task we choose to invest it in.
When we choose to invest attention in a given task, we say that we have formed an intention, or set a goal for ourselves. How long and how intensely we stick by our goals is a function of motivation.
Therefore intentions, goals, and motivations arc also manifestations of psychic negentropy. They focus psychic energy, establish priorities, and thus create order in consciousness. Without them mental processes become random, and feelings tend to deteriorate rapidly. Intentions focus psychic energy in the short run, whereas goals tend to be more long-term, and eventually it is the goals that we pursue that will shape and determine the kind of self that we are to become. This order, which manifests itself in predictable actions, emotions, and choices, in time becomes recognizable as a more or less unique “self.”
…The best solution might be to understand the roots of one’s motivation, and while recognizing the biases involved in one’s desires, in all humbleness to choose goals that will provide order in one’s consciousness without causing too much disorder in the social or material environment. To try for less than this is to forfeit the chance of developing your potential, and to try for much more is to set yourself up for defeat. If challenges are too high one gets frustrated, then worried, and eventually anxious. If challenges are too low relative to one’s skills one gets relaxed, then bored. If both challenges and skills are perceived to be low, one gets to feel apathetic. But when high challenges are matched with high skills, then the deep involvement that sets flow apart from ordinary life is likely to occur. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes.
Happy New Year.
So anyways, I did another of those on-line quizzes, this time concerning my ethico-philosophical outlook, and it turns out that J-P Sartre and I are a perfect match.
Which is worrying, as I don’t smoke and have never been particularly French.
Ethical Philosophy Selector Rankings:
1. Jean-Paul Sartre (100 %)
2. Kant (100 %)
3. Spinoza (98 %)
4. John Stuart Mill (96 %)
5. Aquinas (89 %)
6. Jeremy Bentham (86 %)
7. Stoics (83 %)
8. St. Augustine (75 %)
9. Ayn Rand (68 %)
10. Aristotle (65 %)
11. Cynics (64 %)
12. Nel Noddings (63 %)
13. Nietzsche (63 %)
14. Epicureans (62 %)
15. David Hume (61 %)
16. Ockham (43 %)
17. Plato (43 %)
18. Thomas Hobbes (40 %)
19. Prescriptivism (27 %)
I’m re-reading Richard Holloway’s Looking in the Distance, which I’m finding very comforting at present.
Referring to the need to update the myths that we use to help explain our existence, he says:
“Today’s scientific story differs from the Christian story in almost every way. For one thing, the time frame has shifted unimaginably. Rather than Archbishop Usher’s manageable 6,000 years, we now have to get our minds onto a time line that began 14 or 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang. This earth, the centre and purpose of the cosmos in the previous paradigm, is now described as a tiny fragment of stardust, probably about 5 billion years old, in a back street of one small galaxy in a universe of billions of galaxies. We are told that though life on earth emerged 3.5 billion years ago, our human ancestors only diverged from chimpanzees a mere 5 million years ago. Instead of being the hero of the narrative from the beginning, our species appeared on the scene comparatively recently, anything between half a million and 34,000 years ago.
“And far from having a divinely ordained purpose and direction, the whole thing seems to be in a permanent state of Heraclitan flux, a vast and meaningless explosion of energy that is prodigal in its indifferent wastefulness. … The paradox is that, being gifted and afflicted with consciousness, we pay close attention to the universe, even though it is uninterested in us.
“We are creatures with a passion for discovering the meaning of things who find ourselves in a universe without any discernible purpose.
“So what now can be the basis for human values? If there is no ultimate meaning, how do we find proximate meaning for our lives? … The practical difficulty we face is how to live harmoniously with each other within the empty spaces of the quantum universe.
“… Is there something in the life process itself that is trying to express itself through the dark mirror of human consciousness?
“Obviously, there is no way of answering that questions, but there is a way of responding to it.
“We could choose to live as though the best meaning and purpose we can find or our own lives is the very meaning and purpose of the universe itself. We could pay the Universe a compliment it probably does not deserve by living as though its purpose were love, as one tradition in Christianity says it is. And it the universe, in the end were to prove us wrong, who cares?
“Our lives then would have been an act of defiance of indefferent power, and power is always worth defying. Even though we experience God as absent, we should continue to live as though he were present in love.
“That’s why I love (the words of) Unamuno:
‘Man is perishing. That may be; and if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it will be an unjust fate’.”
- Looking in the Distance, Richard Holloway.
“It goes like this. Let’s see now:
‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know.
Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know.
Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.’
That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”
“There’s another prayer that goes with it that’s very important, so you’d better jot this down, too. It goes,
‘Lord, lord, lord…’
It’s best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure. ‘
Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen…’
And that’s it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from missing out that last part.’”
- Old Man Oracle’s prayer given to Arthur Dent,
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas Adams
So, I visited my town of birth at the weekend. Depressing!
During the evning: pavements packed with fellow-humans inappropriately dressed for freezing temperatures, drinking over-priced alcohol to excess, and conning themselves into believing thet they were ‘having a good time’.
During the day: pavements packed with fellow-humans doggedley going about their ‘pre-Christmas’ purchase-fest; it had never quite hit me just how much our (‘developed world’) culture relies upon consuming, consuming and more consuming. Shops werestacked floor-to-ceiling with the kind of tacky ‘gift’ that is produced entirely for the Christmas market, whose only purpose is to part customer from cash (so-called ‘novelty’ gifts – hah!). We don’t buy things that we need for survival. We don’t even necessarily buy things that our loved-ones will actually use. We just buy anything to show that we fit in with the general spendfest and to show that we haven’t forgotten our loved ones at this special time of … consumption. Why not just give a hug? a conversation?
Is it all just a way of avoiding hard existential reality?
Wouldn’t accepting reality, in the end, be more honest?
Some of my, apparently sane, fellow-human beings live their lives according to some of the stupidest ‘rules’ you could imagine.
I had forgotten just how angry I get about this until yesterday when a Ffriend mentioned that she’s been invited to a party to celebrate (sic) (and sick) the circumcision of a baby boy.
I mean: SICK or what?
Would we invite friends round to celebrate us smacking our new baby around the head? Gouging out his eyes? No?
But sitting around eating canapés whilst some guy hacks away at a baby’s penis – without anaesthetic – that’s OK because it’s a religious belief. (the parents’ belief, notice: not the baby boy’s belief). And we can’t question religious beliefs, can we?
Well, by chance I came across this part poem by Peter Reading, which sums up all this stupidity:
from Going On
PETER READING
This is unclean: to eat turbots on Tuesdays,
tying the turban unclockwise at cockcrow,
cutting the beard in a south-facing mirror,
wearing the mitre whilst sipping the Bovril,
chawing the pig and the hen and the ox-tail,
kissing of crosses with peckers erected,
pinching of bottoms (except in a yashmak),
flapping of cocks at the star-spangled-banner,
snatching the claret-pot off of the vicar,
munching the wafer without genuflexion,
facing the East with the arse pointing backwards,
thinking of something a little bit risqué,
raising the cassock to show off the Y-fronts,
holding a Homburg without proper licence,
chewing the cud with another man’s cattle,
groping the ladies – or gentry – o’Sundays,
leaving the tip on the old-plum-tree-shaker,
speaking in physics instead of the Claptrap,
failing to pay due obeisance to monkeys,
loving the platypus more than the True Duck,
death without Afterlife, smirking in Mecca,
laughing at funny hats, holding the tenet
how that the Word be but fucking baloney,
failing to laud the Accipiter which Our Lord saith is Wisdom.
Started by Australopithecus, these are
time-honoured Creeds (and all unHoly doubters
shall be enlightened by Pious Devices:
mayhems of tinytots, low-flying hardwares,
kneecappings, letterbombs, deaths of the firstborns,
total extinctions of infidel unclean wrong-godded others).
You can hear the poet reading it here.
This is interesting: J L H Thomas in ‘The Mean-ing of life’ suggests that
“… life has a meaning when we ‘mean’ life, when we convey or express something by our actions : the next question is how we do that. The idiom of doing something ‘meaning it’, that is seriously, helped a little here by suggesting that mean-ing is not so much a matter of what we do as of the way we do it…”
He goes on to suggest that:
“… the meaning of an action does not depend solely upon ourselves: we cannot simply mean what we like by what we do. Rather, the meaning depends in part upon the background or context of action, which provides a pattern to which our action conforms : when scoring a goal, the context is provided by the rules of football word Thus,… we set our aims and objectives in life, but we do not determine the meaning of what we do, which arises instead from the interplay between our actions and their context.
He goes on:
“… we had to recognise that the meaning of life is not, as it were, spread evenly over the whole of life, like the icing on a cake : the meaningfulness of our actions is a matter of degree rather than an all-or-nothing affair – no one would consider washing up to be as meaningful as philosophical discussion, for example.
“Rather, the meaningfulness of life is concentrated at certain points, or ‘hot spots’, an idea we could express terminologically by dividing actions into ordinary everyday acts and especially meaningful deeds. This concentration of meaning is indeed part and parcel of meaning itself, for the meaningful or significant stands out from its background : were everything equally meaningful, nothing would stand out, and so nothing mean.
” … these areas of intense, concentrated meaning” are all “ceremonial in nature. (Ceremony intended here to include such things as everyday courtesy, professional etiquette, forms of hospitality, neighbourly services, celebrations, pedagogical situations, the conventions of public meetings, and artistic and sporting events, for example, as well as the explicitly ritual) : all these occasions, when life, so to speak, is accelerated, irradiate the rest of life and imbue it with meaning.
“Life as a whole acquires meaning when we engage in ceremonial (or better, sign-like) activity, and so behave meaningfully : the meaning of life… is a mosaic of mean-ings, rather than one all-embracing Meaning.”
“The existence (sic) of the Big Bang begs the question of what came before that, and who or what was responsible. It certainly demonstrates the limits of science as no other phenomenon has done. The consequences of the Big Bang theory for theology are profound. For faith traditions that describe the universe as having been created by God from nothingness, this is an electrifying outcome (sic). Does not such an astonishing event as the Big Bang fit the definition of a miracle?
“… (Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow) writes: ‘Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements and the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man (sic) commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy’.
“I have to agree. The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could that.”
Thus Dr Francis S Collins, head of the Human Genome Project in ‘the Language of God’, quoting Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow.
It worries me that respected men of great scientific expertise can:
- use language so imprecisely
- (we can’t say that any event, even a hypothetical one, exists; events happen ) ;
- if the Big Bang is a hypothetical event, how can it also be an outcome?
- adopt the anthropocentric view of life (the Big Bang was the first in a chain of events leading to man …)
- suppose that a hypothetical event that we find hard to understand from the point of view of our current limited understanding must inevitably require a Divinity to explain it; does this not simply push the question back one stage further: ‘if there is a God behind the Big Bang, who or what created God’?
But maybe I’ve missed something.
“We humans seem to possess a deep-seated longing to find the truth, even though that longing is easily suppressed by the mundane details of daily life. Those distractions combine with a desire to avod considering our own mortality, so that days, weeks, months or even years can easily pass where no serious consideration is given to the eternal questions of human existence.”
From ‘The Language of God’, by Francis Collins
A Quaker friend of mine used to say:
‘Moderation in all things,
including moderation’,
which is a bit circular.
In a similar way, I seem to be being taught that:
‘it’s important to learn to accept the things that we can’t change’,
and
‘it’s also important to accept
that we can’t accept some of the things that we can’t change’,
if that’s where we are…
“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.
Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.
All other questions follow from that.”
A. Camus
