Thank you to my friend for listening to me reading my essay out loud to them to see if itâs okay.Â
Disclaimer: No research has been done to back up my claims and views in this essay. Itâs based only on what Iâve happened to read/see and my own experiences. Take everything with a grain of salt. However, I do hope this essay will help you.
Note: A lot of what Iâm discussing here, I learned from Jordan Peterson. Yeah. Him. If you know him, you probably either demonize him or put him on a pedestal. It seems that the people that are neither and just critically examine what he says without assuming that he has some kind of evil agenda or that heâs a savior sent by God are rare or are just not vocal on the internet. I donât know if the two extremes are justified, but they certainly are understandable. Look him up and youâll get it. I would ask you not to watch the videos that are titled to obviously get praise and views from the right and hate (and views) from the left (I dislike both sides) because of the way they frame him, and I like to think that the best of what he has to offer is truly in his lectures on Youtube. But itâs up to you. Either way, I hope you check out said lectures. Iâve only seen about half of his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures, but theyâve helped me improve my life a lot. Honestly, you could probably just watch those lectures and ignore this blog entirely. But hey, if this gets you watching them, thatâd good enough for me. I did try my best to add all I could though. So I hope thatâs something thatâll help you.
You value certain things over others. And you have to. Itâs what lets you move and act, and itâs what gives you, or would give you, a sense of purpose. You give importance to some things over others, believe this rather than that. So you have a hierarchy of values. And because you have that hierarchy of values, you can orient yourself towards a goal, and so you have some idea as to what you should do. And, well, your environment is there. You have reality around you, the physical environment, strangers, acquaintances, friends, the social climate, the culture that society is ensconced within, etc. And because you have that goal, you can decide how to navigate that reality.Â
If your value system were flat, that is to say you didnât have one, âcause whatâs valuable when nothing is above anything else in importance, thereâd be no difference between going about your daily life and the truck about to hit you, as far as you can tell. So itâs really important that you get that right. Because if your value system is skewed, in disarray, or just has something bad or inadequate at the top of it, youâre going to be leading yourself to some very dark places. And it can lead you all the way to Hell. So that hierarchy of values is in itself meaningful. And itâs what makes things, actions, events, symbols, and thought meaningful.
So the problem now is what should we believe in? Thatâs hard. You canât even answer that without first having an already present value system, because then what should or shouldnât be believed in wouldnât matter. Thankfully, living beings arenât born blank slates. We value life as made evident by the very fact that weâre alive and act to keep it that way. Itâs precursory to everything else. And we want to get the most out of it. So you could say that you want to believe in something that will let you navigate reality such that you get the most out of life.Â
And I think this is the same idea which religions operate upon. Thatâs what the idea of an afterlife or enlightenment is, as well as why thereâs a good and a bad place. Itâs the belief that you can do something with your life that will transcend death, and because of that, what you do with your life matters. Because death and suffering are the ultimate arguments against the existence of meaning, and theyâre really strong arguments. Those two can destabilize your perception of reality and make the reality you thought you knew and was working fine just minutes ago seem suddenly made of chaos. How do you justify to yourself that your life is worth anything when itâs full of so much suffering and will eventually end in death? And it gets harder to do that the worse of a place youâre in. How do you get yourself to believe with all your being that you should strive to get somewhere better? That you should become better? It seems that you need to be able to believe in something more valuable than life.
The question of what a meaningful life is seems to be a question of purpose. What should you aim your life towards? To what end? Because whatever you believe in, thatâs what youâre headed towards. Whatever set of things (values, virtues, etc.) you hold to be of the highest importance, thatâs the thing that your life is oriented towards. So I think you should orient your life towards the most noble goal you can see yourself reaching. That seems to be what most belief systems do anyway. You donât have to reach it immediately, of course. Part of reaching for that goal will be taking the necessary steps to better yourself over the course of the rest of your life.
What this is in its totality is a belief of what the Good is. What would the Good be? Hell if I know. No one can tell you what the Good is, and every belief system will have its own idea of what it is. And even then they can only tell you, at best, what the Goodâs effect is or what following it will result in. And they can only give you a general estimation of what it will result in. It seems to be a self-evident thing, along with all other forms of perfection (like Beauty and Love). Thatâs not too important. Whatâs important is that we do know what good things are. And we can tell when weâre not doing good if we pay attention. We feel weaker. We cause unnecessary suffering. We lie to minimize the damage but damage our relationship in the long-term. Likewise, we can tell when weâre doing something  What that seems to mean, at the very least, is that although you could come up with an infinite number of value systems placing different things at the top, some value systems are more suitable for guiding people to living properly.
And you might say something like you believe helping others to be a good thing but you donât do it anyway, as a counterexample. Well, maybe you donât really believe it. Maybe you just know it while not really having enough reason to follow through with it. Because to believe in something also means to be committed to it. This is something I learned from an audio recording of Alan Watts when he talks about acting and deciding needing to be simultaneous (though I donât know if my interpretation of it is correct, so please correct me if you think itâs not; I also barely know anything about Buddhism so seriously, take this with a lot of salt). What I understood from it, perhaps as a derivation of part of what he said, is that thereâs no difference between believing and acting on a belief. Thatâs what commitment is. Although you may not be physically applying the belief onto a concrete situation at the moment, if you are committed you are already oriented such that you are presently someone who will act on the belief whenever applicable. Commitment is believing that you should act a certain way.
Another possibility is that maybe you âbelieveâ it, but maybe you value something else more. The possibility of embarrassment or disappointment seems to be something some people have a strong urgency to pay attention to. And it can get in the way of being productive. If thatâs how it is for you, then perhaps you value the avoidance of the possibility of failure too much and put it way over the possibility of gaining something meaningful from trying. Completely understandable. And itâs certainly the right thing to value when the risk is far too much for the reward. But if the possibility of a failure that will do little to no lasting damage causes you to avoid trying altogether, then maybe you should reexamine your values.
In either case (feel free to point out more and Iâll try to address them) we come to what I believe is the hardest problem to overcome. I donât think itâs too hard to know how to live properly. You can learn, and generally we can all approximate that some things are better for us than others. After that, it would be a matter of adjusting and improving yourself and what you know as you notice more and more about yourself. Then it will come with time. The hardest problem, I believe, is getting yourself to believe that you should live properly in the first place. And this is what I intend to discuss in my next essay.
Thatâs it for now. I hope this helps you guys.
(I had written this as a side note to something that I eventually deleted. But itâs relatively long for a side note so I didnât wanna delete it and kept it here anyway)
This is something I learned in Metaphysics.
Why is it reasonable to believe that God exists? The line of reasoning goes that finite beings donât possess self-sufficient reason for their existence. I think the easiest way to understand this is with the Law of Conservation of Energy and Mass. Finite beings come from already present matter. And so for all matter to even exist, it must be that an infinite being, which does possess self-sufficient reason for their existence (and yeah, I know, defies the Law of Conservation anywayâŚ), made them exist. And that infinite being must be unique because it canât be that there are two infinities as these two infinities would be the same thing. That infinite being would be God.Â
But this is only if we presuppose that reason is self-evident. Why should we? Well, you canât answer that because youâd have to use reason. Reason is its own reason for being necessary. And whoâs the perfection of all? God. God is reason. So why must it be that God exists? Because God. (Man, I hope I explained that correctly). So itâs possible, when not presupposing that reason is self-evident, that existence is absurd and has no meaning.Â
As far as I know, thereâs no argument for ruling out the second possibility. I myself can only give an argument for why youâd want to believe in the first possibility rather than the second. And itâs that the second possibility is to believe that you might as well be dead. Thereâs nothing to gain from it, as gain is only gain in the context of the presupposition that there is meaning to existence. And, you know, we seem to believe that there is meaning to existence anyway, even if one donât necessarily believe that God exists. Because if we truly believed, with body and mind, that thereâs no such thing as meaning, then weâd just not move until we died because the perpetuation of life through action would have no meaning to us.
Second, why would Godâs existence as our creator give us meaning? Well, for this, we go to the four causes. Particularly, Final Causality. Also, Efficient Causality. But to be quite honest, this is already taking more words than I initially thought. I am not explaining Efficient Causality as well. I donât even want to explain the whole of Final Causality. In any case, I donât believe I need to for the purpose of this discussion.
The important thing to know is that everything, because it exists (and exists because something caused it to exist), has a final cause, a purpose in a way. A useful analogy is that of creator and creation. A carpenter doesnât make a chair without the purpose of having it to be sat on. Even if you were to create something to just stand there and be useless, that in itself is a purpose. That it was made to exist means that it is âheading towardâ some kind of end. So while things can be âuselessâ in the conventional sense, they cannot be purposeless. It must be that everything has a final cause, because without a final cause, there would be no sufficient reason for a particular cause to result in a particular action. Without a final cause, everything would again be absurd and meaningless. And so with us being created by God, we must have a final cause that we are acting toward. What that is, no one knows. But, if reason is presupposed to be self-sufficient, our existence and actions do have purpose and meaning.
(This isnât Theology, by the way. Iâm not talking about any specific God of any specific religion.)
I really hope I explained all this correctly or at least well enough to be understood. Iâm really not the best person to be learning about this from. The book we used for our class was Metaphysics by Coreth, I think. If you wanna learn more, you could use that.
All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistanceâit is the partial sleep of thoughtâit is the submergence of our own personality by another.
She knew nothing of doctrines and systems- of mysticism and quietism: but this voice out of the far-off middle ages, was the direct communication of a human soulâs belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.
So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each otherâs sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
