What's It All About?

The question makes sense.  Variant: What's it all mean? Ron Crumb's Mr. Natural has an answer for you:

The answer illustrates the use of' 'shit' as a quantifier, an 'urban quantifier' if you will.  This predicament we are in -- call it life -- doesn't mean anything.  The 'urban' use of 'shit' is an interesting linguistic bagatelle that I explored some years back in a delightful post entitled Quantificational Uses of 'Crap.' But the meaning, point, purpose of life is no bagatelle, linguistic or otherwise.

I find it unutterably strange that we might die, become nothing, and never find out what it was all about, or that it was never about anything.  We the living do not know what it is all about, and if the curtain doesn't rise at the hour of death, no one will ever know. Or at least no mortal will ever know. How strange that would be!  Could it be like that?

It could be in the sense that it is epistemically possible, that is, possible for all we can legitimately claim to know.  I am using 'know' in that strict and serious way according to which knowledge entails objective certainty. What I know sensu stricto I know without the possibility of mistake. But people are lazy and sloppy and claim to know all sorts of things that "just ain't so" (Ronald Reagan) when in fact that don't know 'jack' or 'squat' or 'diddly squat.'

No doubt many believe both that life has a meaning, point, purpose, and what that meaning is.  But belief is not knowledge. People believe the damnedest things. (A sizable number of leftists believe that one can change one's sex and race, that math is racist, and that Trump is Hitler.) Corollary to belief's not being knowledge is the fact that conviction is no guarantee of truth. 

The most one can attain in this life is a reasoned belief and a reasoned conviction. And most don't even get that far. (My meta-claim of course applies to itself: I do not claim to know, sensu stricto, that it is true. I claim merely that it is reasonably believed.)  

Can we reason our way forward here? Note first that Mr. Natural's claim is just that, a claim. He is merely opining, and indeed blustering. What the hell does he know, or Ron Crumb, his creator? 

You cannot prove that life has an ultimate meaning that overarches the petty and proximate meanings of the quotidian round. But you are within your epistemic rights in believing it, assuming you do so reasonably and responsibly.  And so I revert to what I have said many times before, namely, that in the end we must decide what we will believe and how we will live.  For a deeper dive, see yesterday's installment.

The will comes into it. The decision is free but not arbitrary in the pejorative sense: the decision is reached after due doxastic diligence has been exercised in the evaluation of the various considerations for and against, and the decision is maintained over time by ongoing evaluation as new arguments and evidences surface.  Don't confuse liberum arbitrium with random neuronal swerves. 

Comments

[Jeff Allen]

Bill, two things about the R. Crumb cartoon:
one, Harry Frankfurt identified this in "On Bullshit."
two, for all that it is not B.S., it's certainly existentialist nihilism.
I guess there was a lot of that going around then...

[BV]

I read Frankfurt's book. I don't recall him referencing Crumb.

By the way, what Mr Natural says is 'shit,' not 'bullshit.'

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/bullshit/