B. Pessimism and existentialism.

1. The agony of the human predicament.

The best possible and truly meaningful worlds are not elusive to atheistic existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; they simply do not exist as they describe man in the “human predicament.”. The human predicament again hits us full-force. First, Camus and Sartre dash our ordinary beliefs about God; God doesn't exist. To think so, to even have faith, is to be intellectually dishonest given a serious impartial study of the way the world works. In a nutshell, God wouldn't have, couldn't have made this world as bad as it is and still be who or what He is. Quite frankly, they tell us that the God of our dreams and hopes does not exist and that we are wasting our time thinking about Him. Second, it is not obvious that this world is good, beautiful, that humans are the best creatures to inhabit it or that suffering or evil is at all instrumentally necessary (good). In fact, this world is very much antagonistic to our actions; bad events occur which do not lead to any good at all. Young children die from terrible diseases; for what purpose, we cannot see or come up with any satisfying answer. The world is fundamentally an unknowable thing, being brutally mechanistic at the core. Third, man literally appears on the scene in his body without an explanation of what his purpose is; his existence precedes his essence. He is conscious of his surroundings, but is no more cognizant of the "big picture" and how he fits into it than a rat is of the overall plan of a psychologist's maze. Man's examination of himself and his surroundings continues to reveal that objective purposes are non-existent; only if there were a God could there be non-anthropomorphic objective purposes. But, without Him, the world is left to itself --a buzzing, whirring, purposeless mass of quarks or “strings” mechanically moving around in (or deriving from) space, producing sentient beings some of which are humans who have, unlike the rest, the abilities to be self-conscious and reason.

The world looked at from this perspective becomes the cruelest joke possible. Beings like humans evolve with enough consciousness and reason to realize that they can never have an objective knowledge of what their purpose is in a mechanically arbitrary world. If humans were omniscient --if they had a power of knowledge that was God's-- then they could know objectively what the universe is and how/why it does what it does. But, inasmuch as humans are not gods, about all that is certain to man is that he will die. This brute fact makes human existence purposeless to the point of absurdity; why should any action be chosen over another if, in the final outcome, the "payoff" is death?

The situation in which we find ourselves is desperate. Consciousness and reason, two powers which separate us from mere beasts, rather than being crowning attributes now become tormenting capacities. Consciousness becomes a disease or malaise each time we try to discover through reason some objective purpose which would explain or give meaning to our existence. The closer we look at the world, the stranger and more alien it becomes. A toilet is a familiar item, but from a different perspective, what a strange apparatus! Looking straight into the world is an approach/avoidance behavior which only leads to our being tortured by the frustration of ending up with no answers; the more we look closely at the familiar items in our world, the more they retreat into strangeness. At rock-bottom, the world just will not reveal its deepest mysteries, ever.

The strangeness of the world to us or alienation is found not only in the way the world appears to us, but within our conscious selves and our relations to other persons. Simply regarding other persons doing everyday actions reduces them in a split-second of cognition to strange machines harboring "artificial intelligences" or "ghosts." We may look at a friend and say "Hello, nice to see you," and then, a mere second later, cognize him as a mass of biological goo. When our spouse lies asleep beside us, is the person still there or is there merely the soft purring of a complex alien mass of tissue?

Further, a look internally is even more perplexing. The I of our thoughts disappears the moment we try to examine it (See the works of a philosopher, David Hume), leaving a vicious truism, "I think, therefore I suffer (the torment of not being even able to find the I which searches)," or better, "something thinks, therefore, something suffers." Consciousness turns out to be more like a feedback system for a machine that has the mechanical purpose of reproduction and survival than the creative power which enables human autonomy and personal identity. The conscious self is a mere passive epiphenomenon of the mechanical body which it "inhabits" the self is an out-of-body-yet-associated-with-the-body ghost, a no-where phantom with the "DRG" (diagnostic related group) called "self." We would think that self-knowledge would be the easiest and most reliable of all. Yet, trying to grasp the I of the self is as elusive as trying to see the lens of our eyes by which we see. Our personal identity disappears the more we try to get a handle on it.

2. The question about the meaning of life is of utmost importance.

Given the crushing severity of the affliction of self-consciousness which reduces the world to the absurd and our "selves" to images in mirrors which we cannot even see, Camus acknowledges that there is but only one real, meaningful philosophical question: "Why shouldn't we commit suicide?" (See Albert Camus’, The Myth of Sisyphus) If there is no meaning or purpose in life, if it consists of an ongoing struggle against mechanical absurdity only to end in death, then why prolong the agony? If we are serious persons and practice what we preach, then we had better come up with an answer less reason demand suicide.

A solution must not go beyond the powers of our intellect, otherwise it would fall easy prey to rational criticism which destroys superstitious beliefs, which such a constructed belief would be. Moreover, the answer must be usable; it must explain the world and our place in it so that we can live in the world. Put another way, the thesis must be not only believable, but be capable of leading to meaningful action. It must give meaning to the world, human existence, and most especially (for each of us) to "my" life. Saving the world is not good enough unless I am includes in it. As Spinoza puts it (See his work on the Emmendation of the Intellect), "Further reflection convinced me that if I could really get to the root of the matter, I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good. I thus perceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be --as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him unless a remedy be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein."

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