The germs of these thoughts came to me while climbing the Allan Blackman trail to Circlestone Ruins in the Eastern Superstition Wilderness in May of 1998.
Does it matter whether life has an ultimate meaning or not? Someone might be satisfied if he has a good chance of attaining middle-sized happiness: peaceful days, restful nights, an adequate supply of health and wealth, satisfying employment, a loving spouse, friends, progeny, long life, and the like. Why not rest our hopes in what is known to be possible rather than in what is not known to be possible, such as immortality, the resurrection of the body, the visio beata, entry into Nirvana? Why hanker for what is beyond our mortal scale? Why not accept the finite? Are we not just a particularly clever species of land mammal?
The refutation of this lowering of one's spiritual sights and acquiescence in middle-sized happiness is death and impermanence. Impermanence argues unreality. It did so for Plato, and rather more recently it did so for Nietzsche the anti-Plato in a backhanded way. What is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same if not a mad attempt at wringing eternity from flux by one who was "grieved by the transitoriness of things" as he put it in a letter to Franz Overbeck? All metaphysicians, East and West, feel the unreality of the impermanent. That's what makes them metaphysicians. If wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, as Plato said in the Theaetetus, the sense of the unreality of the impermanent is the feeling of the metaphysician.
What is impermanent (anicca) is unreal (anatta) and thus also unsatisfactory (dukkha). To lose oneself in the ultimately unsatisfactory can strike the metaphysician as horrifying. Death, as signalling radical and irreversible change, is the muse of philosophy. What Jack London in John Barleycorn called "The Noseless One" refutes myopic worldliness.
To one on his deathbed, this fleeting life, about to vanish, must appear empty and worthless, much ado about nothing, a vain struggling and jockeying for position in a parade going nowhere. But the possiblity of death is here right now for all of us, and this metaphysical insecurity demonstrates the impossibility of myopic world-immersion for one who sees clearly. One cannot be satisfied by a merely mundane meaning. Whether or not life has an ultimate meaning, one cannot live meaningfully except in quest of it.
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