Thoughts about meaning and nothing
I just listened a few lectures about Albert Camus. His The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus made me realize something. Nothing is nothing only in relation to something! Let me elaborate. I live my life with my rational mind expecting, and sometimes even demanding, life to be fair and meaningful. But in the end I am like Sisyphus. My life adds up to nothing at all. All the work I am doing adds up to noghing.
If asked: “why are you doing, what you are doing?”, I always end up justifying my actions with pleasure or happiness. But immidiately I get in trouble, when I’m asked: “Why does it matter to be happy?” I think I am cheating myself. I constantly gravitate on acting and thinking as if things mattered.
But the important thing is, that the absense of meaning is itself meaningless. The nothing that my life adds up to, gets its meaning only with the presupposition of something. Not only that, but the presupposition of something beign better than nothing, is also necessary for my ‘angst’ to be meaningful.
(I use ‘angst’ here in it’s Kierkegaardian meaning; except that the god-postulate isn’t necessary. I tend to feel responsibility towards living “importantly” even though I don’t believe in god.)
I think this adds up to something. If I experience angst, I have already conjured up something meaningful. I can’t experience angst if my life truly is meaningless. The sense of meaning, is itself important enough. Maby there is nothing behind the mask, but it’s greedy and unpolite not to aprreciate the handsom mask! If I get a present that only consists of wrapping paper, my first intuition might be to downplay the “gift”, but how insensitive of me not to admire the beautifull wrapping paper!
a handsome mask
wrapping paper... but I don't know if it's "beautifull"
