I figure that a good, or at least necessary, first blog post is an explanation of its title. My blog’s name is a reference to the phrase scribbled on Mamimi’s cigarette in episode 1 of the anime FLCL. In the director’s commentary of the episode, director Tsurumaki Kazuya tells us what it means: “How can I say it? Um... There's a best way, and not everyone can follow it. No one knows the best way. I thought it reflected Mamimi's belief that there's no future. That it had a nuance that said she's given up on life.” While I haven’t given up on life per se, I’ve given up on trying to figure out the best way, on trying to control it. This is reflected in what I consider to be my core belief system.
These are my core beliefs: I think, therefore I am. That’s all I can be 100% sure of. Everything else I think of is just subjective ideas, and the thought experiments I often partake in are just for shits and giggles. I must remember to stop thinking about both the practical and abstract sometimes though and just enjoy the real fun of life.
I think the first thing that got me thinking this way was when I got rid of my religion. It seems that a lot of people go through similar spiritual phases in life; many people experience a “dark night of the soul” in which they are filled with religious doubt, and many people have spiritual reawakening in their lives where they find some sort of spirituality again. I was lucky enough to go through these (at least their first incarnation, I’m still very young) very early in my life. My love of dinosaurs and earth history as a child meant that I quickly doubted the biblical creation myth, and by twelve years old I was more or less an agnostic boarding on an atheist (of course I didn’t know the terms for these ideas yet). But a spiritual awakening in 7th grade had me crawling back to my God, and I became a better practicing Catholic than the rest of my family for three years. I don’t regret either of these periods in my life because the former meant that my faith would always be on my own terms, and the latter gave me the positive outlook on life that preventing me from frequenting Hot Topic in high school. The moment I started rejecting Catholicism came in 10th grade, during a conversion about the differences in religious dogma with a protestant. She argued that most of Catholic dogma was based around rules made up by medieval church leaders, and we have no reason to trust that they know what God wants for us. While she was just trying to convert me to another barely different sect of Christianity, it was the spark of religious nihilism I needed to realize what many other people have: that we have no idea what the fuck the spiritual metaphysical framework of this universe is, what our god or gods would want us to do, or even if they exist at all. Since then I’ve gradually drifted into a sort of spiritual nihilism, a mix between deism and I’ve been told Daoism, with the only the ontological argument holding me back from being a true agnostic. I can’t imagine a loving or even neutral god expecting anything more from us than thinking for ourselves and going with our intuition and reason, and since we’re screwed no matter what under a hateful or non-existent god that’s what I’m going to do. My current idea is a god resembling the Force from Star Wars, an idea that is made even more attractive to me with the inclusion of midichlorians.
As for scientific truth, any true scientist will tell you that nothing is 100% certain in science, and this is what makes science so great. Unlike religion there is never an end result in science, we always hold a possibility that our scientific doctrine is based on fallacies that won’t be rooted out until the next generation of technology comes along to improve our observations. My biology professors encouraged my classes early on to always question them and to never take science’s collective knowledge for granted. I was introduced to this much earlier than college though. One of my favorite literary moments of all time is the closing monologue in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World. The main characters spend the whole book discussing awesome biological theories about dinosaurian behavior and extinction. But as they’re escaping on a raft, the engineer Thorne tells the exhausted young girl character to ignore the heady arguments of scientists Malcolm and Levine.
“I wouldn’t take any of it too seriously. It’s just theories. Human beings can’t help making them, but the fact is that theories are just fantasies. And they change….. A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?’ They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.” Thorne shook his head. “And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That’s the sea. That’s real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That’s all real. You see all of us together? That’s real. Life is wonderful. It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn’t really anything else.”
This paragraph, read at a time in my life when I was being introduced to existentialism and nilhism for the first time, cemented my budding belief system and insured that I wouldn’t suffer the existential angst that so many people seem to deal with. Why be depressed with the possibility that none of your life is real or matters? That just frees us up from the responsibility of leading a life that society deems meaningful. Instead, we can just have fun and enjoy the fleeting, senseless time we have for what it is.
This doesn’t just apply to faith or science, but on general philosophy as well. I’ve been falling in this trap for the last two years of searching for the best way to live my life, a question I previously ignored and chided others for asking. Honestly I think it happened because two of my best friends from college happened to be philosophy majors, and by senior year I gave too much blind credence to their opinions. In a conversation about the ethics of superhero vigilantism I mentioned that I don’t think it’s possible to prove any sort of objective morality exists in this world. They shrugged me off with an “of course we can” and continued the discussion without me. I assumed that their formal training in philosophy meant that there is somehow some actual way of proving objective morals out there, and I wanted to find it. I started researching ideas like deontology and utilitarianism, virtue ethics and irony. I recently had an epiphany however when I realized what I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying to assert my power over reality by classifying it, and in that regards I’ve become no better than a politician or a self-absorbed academic. I’m now back to treating my life and ideas more nilhistically, but this time I’m trying not to completely return to the apathy I had lost during college. I will “never knows best”, and I’m going to try to keep that in mind as I explore the bounds of my reality.
interesting ride amigo. i'm excited to see what you'll write about. while i'm with you on the existentialism and the "never knows best" i can't go with you on the nihilism. it is my hunch that our generation is prone to this because we don't expect to see patterns, only complexity. however, i think there are big patterns that are always true. many take the post-modern route and that leads to lazy deconstructionism or arm-chair nihilism or, even worse, easy and glib fundamentalism as anything, even silliness, is better than meaninglessness.
ReplyDeletei have a thought on what patterns are always true and i test them. because, like you, i find my conclusions must be preliminary and flexible.
That's the tricky thing about philosophy, it's written by a bunch of self-obsessed men who want to put a specific name on their ideas. I know my western-trained mind likes to recognized labeled concepts and keep them in a box, but in reality most people's ideals and certainly my own bleed together in this mixture of different definitions based on the situation. I suppose I could largely be considered existentialistic, but my attitudes and beliefs certainly don't fit that definition all the time. I'm nihilistic in regards to certain specific concepts. For example I'm a constitutional nihilist, meaning that I believe that the chair I'm sitting on doesn't have the "essence" of a chair, but rather is just an object made by people for sitting on, and is made of very specific and know materials, there is no inherent meaning in objects, only meaning that we make for them. But I'm certainly not a nihilist when it comes to things like giving life meaning. I suppose I also think like a deconstructionist a lot of the time too. I guess the closest I come to is absurdism, which is barely even a subset of philosophy. Why do all those philosophies have an inherent angst and depression built into them though? I don't know why meaninglessness is depressing, I find it delightful.
ReplyDeleteHowever, like you I have seen the grander patterns. My academic training has allowed me to witness not only law of entropy in effect but also the systems that keep happening. When I posted on extinction, my main point wasn't that everything dies, but that everything dies and then is reborn. Everything in this universe seems to be a complex set of patterns that keeps occurring. Systems can't help to organize themselves, which is actually what the Chaos Theory discusses- things always succumb to chaos, but out of the chaos, order arises.
It's funny that organized systems always succumb to entropy, but that the law of entropy itself is an organized pattern.
i think we are on the same path but describe it differently. i am an existentialist like you, and an absurdist and offer this sermon as evidence. but where you're an nihilist, i am an Jungian. i think there is great meaning in symbols. yes, a chair doesn't exude an 'essence of chair' in and of itself, but it is us that place meaning on it. but in doing so, a feedback loop is taking place, it gets embedded in our collective neurons. thus we have zeitgeists and a collective unconscious that we can't quite explain nor explain away. meaning matters, symbols matter, and so do the greater patterns.
ReplyDeleteresurrection is the name of the game, not death. this essential fact is why i'm a Christian and not a buddhist. great stuff dawg, i'm loving your blog!
Ahhh, a collective unconscious type thing. You know, I've toyed around with that kind of idea in my head before, specifically as it relates to fiction. Do some fictional characters actually have some essence of reality to them? I mean, Mickey Mouse crosses generations and nations, and the Joker psychologically disturbed the last two live actors that played him.
ReplyDelete