I'll build this post around a passage from Gilson, Tom Gilson, that is, who writes:
If you and I are destined to die, and we are. . . our hope must be in something that will outlast death. Naturalistic philosophy doesn't do it. It's an inadequate explanation for meaning and hope in life, but beyond that, in death, it's way past its capacity. It's not just weak or anemic, it's positively hopeless.
If death is the utter annihilation of the individual person, then life is ultimately senseless and ultimately hopeless. This cannot be evaded by saying that one's life can acquire meaning if it is placed in the service of the lives of others. For their lives too (and the lives of their progeny and their progeny's progeny ad indefinitum) are, on the annihilationist assumption, ultimately senseless and hopeless. Human life is in every case the life of an individual; so even if human beings existed at all times, that would do nothing to insure ultimate meaningfulness.
Of course, there are proximate meanings, hopes, and purposes even if ultimately it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One can lose oneself in them. But to do so involves self-deception: one has to mistake the proximate for the ultimate. One has to burden fleeting concerns with a meaning they cannot bear. One has to fool oneself.
For example, one has to fool oneself that writing a book, starting a company, founding a family are all ultimately meaningful when the only way they could have any ultimate meaning is if they were part of a life that had a direction that wasn't about to be cut short in a few years.
To put it bluntly, we have no future if naturalism is true. But we cannot live without meaning. An existential trilemma looms. Either we cultivate self-deception by ascribing to fleeting concerns ultimate meaning, or we recognize their transiency and ultimate meaninglessness when considered in and of themselves and put our faith and hope in a transcendent meaning, or, avoiding both self-deception and the life of faith, we embrace nihilism.
Now I don't expect any naturalist to accept what I just said. I will be told that it is a false trilemma. There is a fourth way: one can live in and for the finite without self-deception. That will perhaps be followed by the claim that one who looks to the infinite is more justly accused of self-deception.
The four paths can be given names: the way of Nietzsche's Last Man; the way of Faith; the way of Nihilism; the way of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.
It is no easy task to decide among them. But decide we must.
Filed under: Against Naturalism, Meaning of Human Existence
(1) Why do you say that "we cannot live without meaning?"
(2) There is a post forthcoming at my own blog that I think you might find interesting - or maybe misguided. My apologies for the self-promotion.
1. It seems self-evident that one cannot live without acting, and that one cannot act without having purposes and goals, without finding some meaning or point in one's actions, even if it is only a meaning that one projects. Even a nihilist who denies all ultimate and proximate meaning still finds it meaningful to point out the 'truth' of nihilism even if he contradicts himself in so doing. He may proclaim that nothings matters -- but that matters to him.
2. I'll look for your post.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.