Eventually everything ends, even the lovable. Even ending ends. Then there’s nothing.
It’s turtles all the way down, till we come to the one at the bottom who says “Why try? What’s the point of all the travail and effort? What does this whole built up structure–our individual lives, our communities and worlds, our cosmos–amount to anyway since it is ultimately doomed. Any significance will be only local and temporary since mortality is the ultimate fact till there is nothing left to die.” The turtle at the bottom is dissolving away in so-whatness, then the one above, and so on.
This idea, a common conviction, is not often brought up for several reasons. First, there’s nothing to do about it, so why let it depress us. Second, we’re busy doing immediately meaningful things, like staying alive. Third, there isn’t a plausible way to reconcile local, contingent meaningfulness with ultimate, cosmic meaninglessness.
Still the disquieting thought that we individually and our universe as a whole may not have an intrinsic, non-provisional, independent existence throws shade on all our exertions and achievements, if we acknowledge it. Indeed, the realization sometimes strikes us with a pang. This thing I’m looking at now which is so good, so admirable, so wonderful, this very thing, will one day be nothing in particular. This is part of the poignancy of transience: that which has great value now will one day have none, and indeed value itself may lose value.
This idea of ultimate pointlessness leads to a debilitating sense of futility and waste. Contrast it with the notion of evil, the defiant enemy of the good, active destroyer. This is an opponent to be confronted and perhaps defeated. We face up to evil with earnest resolve, some amount of fear, and lots of energy.
Meaninglessness, though, doesn’t wear black armor and glower. Angry disappointment with the conditions of existence is the most vehemence we can muster. Instead we usually tag all experience with a ‘this too will pass’ ruefulness. Surely, we feel, creation, this whole wonderful world, must amount to more than a prelude to final blankness, but how possibly? What can justify the existence of existence?
Meaning is a process of one thing referring to another; for anything to have meaning involves it making reference to, or being referred to by another. Meaningfulness is about the relevance of references. Meaninglessness is the end of relevance, the state of nothing matters, is more or less important than anything else, significance become insignificant, and all things indistinguishable, nothing to choose between.
(Relevance, by the way, is a biological term, applying to all living things, not just us.)
Various philosophies reach toward something which justifies its own existence, something of intrinsic reality, independent, hence beyond the infinite regress of turtles, simply there without interruption or termination, tending to the abstract, universal, impersonal and necessary.
How would we in our concrete, local, personal and contingent existence possibly relate to such a thing, or it to us? We can worship such a thing but how can we work with it?
Through science we learn more and more about the way the physical universe works and the constraints it puts upon us. Through history we learn about the path dependence of our current situation. Through semiotics we understand the world of meanings we both navigate and create, both fish and fountain. Everything is relational, everything is a mix of habit and luck, everything changes. It’s all very exciting, full of surprises, wonderful to contemplate, but not obviously self-justifying. It might just be only what it is, on-going only until it isn’t, sort of like a pop-up party.
If it, the whole ball of wax (our lives included), were to have ultimate meaning, it would have to include or create items of lasting worthwhileness towards which all the proximate meanings would ‘aspire’ or upon which they would be founded. We have icons of this in, say, images of parental love and care, or in acts of courage. Reality is more complex, of course, than any image, and subject to reevaluation and revision as time goes on. The special configuration of the ‘magic moment’ is succeeded by others and it has continued existence only as memory, habit or artifact, and even these degrade or dissolve.
This post is an attempt to address the issue of meaninglessness by identifying in our everyday lives items which are of intrinsic value, and by relating these to the large-scale and long-term agenda of the cosmos. The key to this project is the term ‘livingness’.
We are born with potentialities, latent possibilities, to see, to walk, to talk, think, grow, reproduce, and so on. I want to posit a-till-now-not-fully-recognized potentiality: livingness. Not a exclusively human potentiality, it can be characterized in different ways but perhaps none better than this: alive-now.ness.
The word alive implies readiness, not just for the next iteration of the same old, but what new things or conditions are coming at us, arising in us (as they always are).
The word now means making decisions that matter.
Alive-now.ness then is decisive engagement with where we find ourselves and where we go. It involves awareness, acknowledgement, address, and anticipation. It engages our potentialities, our energies and our powers. It is our dynamic openness to what is, what can be and what may happen. Livingness is learning and changing.
Our livingness is always a potentiality while we’re alive, but not always expressed. Much of the energy of our lives is channelized by habits into repetitive and reliable behaviors that mesh with the things and the people around us to produce an ordered and predictable world. Livingness may seem antagonistic to or disruptive of this regular world but the livingness and life are complementary.
Livingness ends, of course, when life ends, unless (this is important) it is part of an encounter. An encounter is an occasion of two livingnesses, addressing each other as ‘you’ making common cause. A crucial condition: an other, others or otherness. Encounters are not necessarily extraordinary events, but they are not simply mundane either, because (here is where the cosmos comes in) each and every encounter is actively mediated and treasured by a transcendent being, a deus ex ultra that I refer to as ffreshness (to distinguish it from a common quality of encounters: the feeling of freshness). ffreshness has intrinsic reality and confers that value to the encounters it participates in along with us.
How do we experience encounters?
Very often we know encounters by the sensation of openness, of new roominess, of places to go and things to discover and ways to be. The billowing curtain, and the cool and welcome breeze that moves it, is a sign of freshness, and the presence of ffreshness.
Likewise, we observe the presence of something new: perhaps new material, perhaps new momentum, perhaps new message, landscape of potentiality changed, future prospects refreshed, previously unexpected, unsuspected or unavailable. Also, there is something good implicated in this novelty, hospitality, friendship or exploration in some form or another. Indeed, often forms of beauty in the sense of things coming together as internally consistent wholes.
Also, we feel encounters resonate through us and produce, over time, changes in us: the contours of our persona, the components of our identity, the internal configurations of our priorities. These are not just automatic adjustments but are voluntary on some level of conscious awareness.
Finally, encounters create a special bond, an entanglement between all participants going forward-a one, an other and ffreshness itself-such that none can be fully described thereafter without reference to all the rest.
There are lots of different kinds of others, some alive, some virtually or indirectly so, each with their own kind of livingness, actual or attributed. There are also an unlimited number of ways for livingnesses to make common cause with each other. So anyone, anywhere, anytime can encounter, and we do often encounter, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly.
Some encounters we know immediately as special events, others only later, and others never. Some encounters we remember vividly, some vaguely, and some we forget. No matter: all encounters involve ffreshness, so all encounters are in and with ffreshness after our memories lapse, our mortality kicks in, and even the time of the mundane world runs out.
What that means is this: our livingness, as ‘minted’ in an encounter along with that of some other is an intrinsic reality in and through ffreshness. The encounter is where our livingnessness is manifest and also where ffreshness engages with the mundane world. It’s an ever-generative occasion of summation and anticipation, an ever-abiding, ever-accreting unit of value. Our demise, or the death of our civilization or the destruction of the universe doesn’t invalidate the ever-ongoing self-justification of encounters; once they’ve been set going forward, forward they will go forever, in and with ffreshness
ffreshness is ever-active, addressing each of us in the world inviting us to encounter others and othernesses around us. Absolutely non-interventionist, ffreshness pursues its agenda voluntary encounter by encounter. In addition, ffreshness keeps bringing to mind our past encounters such that we encounter them again, each time with new outcomes.
We, re-energized by freshness, intrigued by new possibilities it presents, stimulated by relationships of hospitality, friendship and exploration with the other, together go forth into the world to…make more encounters possible through the amelioration of the world.
Who or what is ffreshness? Let me answer this way: awareness, agenda, agent.
The ground of potentialities, actualities and understandings (or interpretations) upon which and by which all reality, and all existing things (universes and such) come into being, the way for anything to be anything at all, we can call Creator, who contemplates and sustains reality in and through its primal field of unforced and spontaneous livingness.
That same being as agenda, we can call God-in-love, who woos the mundane world into becoming its Beloved Other in a progressive partnership of continual creativity, an ever-ongoing consummation of a new and lively cosmos of unlimited friendship, hospitality and exploration, of change without transience, time without the past and life without death.
The same being as agent we can call ffreshness, who loves all livingnesses.
All three are manifestation of pure and everlasting creative livingness.
Coming back from the ‘heavenlies’, we can look at our lives in a new way if we entertain the propositions I’ve put forward above. We see ourselves alive in a mundane world of constraining physical actualities and semiotic interpretations (to put it most dispassionately) in a desperate (and, we fear, doomed) project of meaning-making. At the same time, we see our livingness engaged with the transcendent world in the making of enduring units of value, which also have a positive resonance in the mundane world. The purpose of life then becomes encountering, encouraging encountering and creating favorable conditions for encountering.
So we can encourage one another to exercise our livingness, gather to report on our experiences and to express our wonder, admiration and gratitude for this world in which encounters are possible.
This doesn’t separate us or make us distant from others or the world. The others we encounter might be objects otherwise. The common cause we make links and changes us, and through us, our world. And encounters aren’t totted up like items in a ledger, they are occasions that engage our most intimate selves, our livingness in ways that may be pleasant and easy or hard and challenging but true to the touching and sometimes tragic nature of our existence.
I should remark that livingness is a potentiality of all living things. What may be encounters for other beings I don’t know. Artists may help here.
So we might summarize like this: The default end of all existence is ultimate oblivion, unless we encounter; the default end of all encounters is everlastingness in ffreshness, unless at the end of our lives, as heirs of our life’s encounters, we opt out of them (which, of course, we can do since encounters have livingness, hence choice.)
The problem of evil is perennial and uneradicable, demanding of us constant vigilance and courage, but the problem of meaninglessness can be resolved by belief in the propositions I’ve presented here.
We conduct our lives on the basis of trust or faith. As we experience, as we listen to testimonies, as we think, we change or confirm the way we live. Particular propositions or systems of belief clarify faith, trying to avoid contradictions but striving to capture the experiential realities that inform it.
So as you consider what I’ve put forward above, ask yourself what is true to your experience, what you have heard or read, and what makes sense (or at least isn’t absurd or nonsensical). Another consideration: is it large enough in scope to matter, is it good enough to want, is it true enough to our own longings to act upon?
Let’s encounter.