We Live and Die in a World We Don’t Fully Understand
[image error]The owl of Athena, a symbol of knowledge in the Western world
In my essay “The Ascent of Meaning” in Lewis Vaughn’s The Moral Life, I wrote,
We cannot then erase all our doubts or allay all our fears. Intellectual integrity demands that we admit that life might be utterly meaningless. All of reality heading … nowhere. Our lives, our cares, our loves, our dreams … all for naught. But then again we do not know that life is meaningless. So we cannot unequivocally either affirm or reject claims about life’s meaning—the honest and brave must tolerate ambiguity. Ultimately, we are uncertain of our place, if any, in the cosmos. And the challenge of life is to live and die in a world that we do not fully understand.
I have thought a lot about the last sentence in the paragraph above—especially my use of the word fully. In retrospect, that word is too weak to convey the idea I have in mind.
Obviously, we don’t fully understand life. But I meant to convey something much stronger—our utter bafflement about the human situation. Many of our beliefs may be true, but we don’t know they’re true; conversely, many of our beliefs may be false but we don’t know that they’re false. So it’s not that we know nothing; it’s that we just don’t know what we know or don’t know.
However, this analysis is too epistemological and doesn’t capture my existential angst. What I meant to convey is that we are almost totally lost when it comes to answers to the deep questions of life and death. That is what we must accept: that those answers, if they even exist, are beyond our grasp. That is what we must come to terms with lest we further fill the world with more harmful nonsense.
When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then. ~Blaise Pascal
