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| Meaning and Blunt Objects |
Thursday, February 14, 2008
My father died of an overdose in his sleep when I was three months old. Whether his death was intentional or accidental has always been ambiguous in my mind. It's something that's always haunted the periphery of my mind, and the subject of suicide has always interested me. Camus wrote that suicide is the most important philosophical question. I think part of what he meant by this was that the converse of the question "Why don't I kill myself" is "Why do I live? What is the meaning of my existence?" Camus believed that there is no purpose to our lives other than the ones we create for ourselves. Recently I've been coming to the same conclusion. Maybe the question itself is a result of religion, and philosophy. Created by man, the question of meaning, may itself be meaningless.
Suppose we survive simply for survival's sake, like all the other species. Certainly the question of meaning does not arise when people are struggling for existence. Suicide is only a real problem in wealthy countries. The more prosperous a group of people is, the more likely it is that some of them will choose to end their own lives, refusing to wait for nature. Only when we have overcome the constant struggle to survive can we begin to reflect on our lives, and ask if there is any point to them at all. Too many of us have decided that the answer to the question is to "be happy" and "have a good time". If this was our only reason for living then the hundreds of millions of people around the world who struggle their entire lives just to survive another day should take one of their blunt tools to their throats and end it right now. They have no hope of getting to the point where they can even understand the concept of happiness in the way we do. "Having fun" is virtually meaningless to them. They will never have the luxury of asking the question "What is the meaning of my life", and if asked by someone else they wouldn't even be able to understand it.
But if we have no purpose, and we are just here to survive, we have surpassed that point as a nation. No one worries about anyone in this country surviving. We may be the only country in the world that has a problem with obesity among our "poor". If we turn our minds away from ourselves and our petty wants and concerns we will be faced with this question of meaning. At some point in all our lives it will be impossible to be happy or have a "good time." This will be especially true if our nation undergoes a major economic or military crisis. This is when we will need a purpose more substantial and less transitory to give us meaning. We may have become too superficial and self-centered to create one.
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Posted by DignaVox on 2009-06-28 10:08:50 | Rating: | Views: 40
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