How to dig meaning out of the noise
[004] Why a faulty theory of perception makes you believe in nihilism (and what you can do about it)
In case of nihilism, break glass
If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is
because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything
until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus,
there is no human nature, because there is no God to have
a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he
conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he
conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be
after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that
which he makes of himself.Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”
Most years, New Zealand spends January at the beach. Not in 2023.
Unexpected extreme weather did a lot worse than cancel summer. In January, much of Auckland was flooded with record-setting rains in a time of year when we’re used to hitting the beach and barbecues. Last week, a cyclone devastated large parts of the north island.
(Here is a link for anyone who might like to donate to the victims who have lost everything.)
This is highly abnormal weather for January and February in this part of the world.
One of the hard facts of life is that it is unpredictable. We may pretend that we have some control, that we know what is going on. But for the most part that is a comforting illusion. Nothing is inevitable or necessary. Even the facts we take most for granted have a way of coming unglued now and then.
The word for things that happen for no reason at all is contingency.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the legendary French pessimist and existentialist philosopher, believed that we are all castaways on the hard ground of contingency. There is no meaning, no higher purpose, no necessary truths to direct our lives. What happens, happens. Searching for higher meaning beyond the events is pointless.
The one upside to our unhappy situation is our power to choose.
We are nothing but what we will for ourselves.
Not what we think or believe, but what we intend by our own choices. We are what we desire to be.
Sartre’s fame vanished long ago. But the main idea of pessimistic philosophy, that human beings are empty centers of choice navigating a meaningless world of dead matter, lives on.
Existentialist pessimism has become almost a default attitude in our hyper-ironic, always-on culture.
I don’t buy it, and this piece is going to cover three reasons why.
1- The “I-That” problem
2- How to experience meaning all around you
3- Reviving a dull inner life
The “I-That” problem
Sartre was a good Frenchman in the rationalist tradition of Descartes. The thinking mind, the cogito, is the only secure source of knowledge available to us.
The Cartesian story paints a picture of a rupture in reality, with our subjective experiences on one side, looking over the canyon to the world as science tells us it really is.
The subjective ego is like a spectator up in the bleachers watching a basketball game down on the court.
It won’t be obvious to outsiders unfamiliar with the history of these ideas, but Sartre’s nihilistic thinking comes quite close to ideas kicked around by today’s pop-science of mind and its weird cultists.
Consider the following from cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman:
Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.
And this exciting thought from Thomas Metzinger:
The first thing to understand, I believe, is that there is no thing like “the self.” Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality. Selves are not something that endures over time. The first person pronoun “I” doesn’t refer to an object like a football or a bicycle, it just points to the speaker of the current sentence. There is no thing in the brain or outside in the world, which is us. We are processes.
Serious scientists speculating from the cutting edges of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence are seriously proposing that your human mind is little more than a contingency machine.
You exist for no reason, to no purpose (besides maybe the purposes of your genes), and can’t even see reality as it is, you blind fool.
This is the same stance that makes some scientists and most of the Silicon Valley set believe that the mind ain’t nought but a mechanism.
Science and philosophy agree that reality is an ugly, empty place.
Is it?
How to experience the meaning around you
If the world really is that bleak, the first question on my mind is “why?”
Ordinary waking consciousness shows us a rich world of things alive with qualities, yet our most respected ideas and value-beliefs tell us it’s all a sham and our own minds are the BS artists responsible. How does that happen?
It’s too soon to start dropping Heidegger on you, good reader, though his method of starting from our ontological situation has a lot to say about this weirdness. How things are for us and how things show up for us has a great deal to do with the appearance of a meaningless world.
That’s for another time. What does matter in that paragraph is the way in which we experience reality.
Where do we put our attention? How do we attend to things?
The late and sadly-underrated Colin Wilson argued that existentialist pessimism had its origins in the mind’s narrow attention to reality. In a state of thoughtless habit, the mind views the world as if with a “microscope”. Imagine standing before a masterwork of Cezanne and holding your eyes only millimeters from the canvas. The context of meaning, the whole painting as an object, disappears as focus narrows in on the brush-strokes.
The loss of meaning drains our mental energies, leaving us in the exhausted state which deprives us from a sense of meaning.
Some of Wilson’s forgotten ideas have been back on the agenda thanks to Iain McGilchrist’s formidable The Master and His Emissary, which I have not read because it is 800 pages and c’mon. Fortunately, I am well-trained in the arts of extracting the vital ideas from academic writers who are far worse prose stylists.
Here’s an interview with McGilchrist where he expresses one of the major differences between the left-brain’s narrow focus, compared with the right-brain’s search for the bigger picture:
Sometimes you need to simplify. For example, if you’re designing a building, or if you’re fighting a campaign, you need a map, a scheme. You don’t really need all the richness of what would be there in the real world. But I’m afraid that — that representation moves into a world where we have the ability constantly to interact with the world only as a representation, over a screen.
Iain McGilchrist
The zoomed-in “microscope” view of reality has a purpose, but without the balancing act with the “telescope” of the brain’s right hemisphere, we confuse the close-in view with the only view.
Our actual technology complicates things. Out here in the extremely-online world of the WEIRD, we don’t just think as if we’re seeing the world through a screen.
We’re living it.
This is a persistent theme in my writing: Our habits of thought follow from our built environment, which reflects our habits of thought.
Thinking builds artifacts which we take as models for thinking.
What’s the solution? Are we left to wander in existential despair, chain-smoking while penning nihilistic manifestos in Parisian cafes?
Colin Wilson suggested that the remedy for a depleted state of mind is the very thing that our screen-based culture discourages:
Action.
Reviving a dull inner life
Once upon a past life-time, I was obsessed with weight training. I lived it and breathed it and helped others do it.
I even wrote a mildly popular book about it. The topic was “how to squat to a max every day of the week”. It wasn’t a joke title. I was dead serious, and for the few years I was writing it, I lived the title.
I learned that human beings have far greater “energy reserves” than it seems on the surface. Also, everyone is an expert who “knows” that you can’t possibly train this way. The two things are related.
The feeling of fatigue in your body is deeply related to feeling fatigue in your mind. They feed into each other. A defeated attitude results in a slumped posture and shallow breathing, the standard ergonomics of today’s office worker. The more you feel deflated and enervated, the more the world looks bleak and meaningless. Seeing an ugly world further saps your energies. A simple piece of good news can pull you right out of the doom spiral. Suddenly the world seems alive and full of promise.
This is easy to experience for yourself by doing any halfway challenging exercise. You start to move with intensity, and your body, miraculous survival machine that it is, puts on the brakes. Maybe you should think twice about those five extra sets you’re about to do. Haven’t you done enough? Relax.
The feeling of fatigue that happens when you first get started is often gone by the end of the hour. I rarely leave the gym thinking “I regret doing this”.
Your body’s conservative advice is well-meant but it isn’t telling you the truth. Push through the feelings of tiredness and you’ll find a whole new level of energy hiding right behind them.
I hadn’t read Colin Wilson back then, but you can imagine my surprise to find he’d stumbled on to the same mechanisms decades before I was born. And he took the idea much further than I had.
When actively using your body, you’re in a world unlike the experience of the “Netflix binger” passively consuming content. Free will might seem mysterious and challenging to the philosopher in his recliner; it’s hard to doubt it when you’re on your last round of interval hill sprints.
That’s the key. Not only that you’re in motion, but the effort of will that it takes to start and continue activity. This skill becomes second nature for practiced athletes. After 25 years of lifting weights, summoning that effort and focusing it into a barbell is no longer a challenge for me. A beginner hasn’t learned this — and I believe that failing to “get it”, to develop habits of will and effort, is a major reason the exercise habit doesn’t stick.
So it is for our experience of life. That feeling of “living on autopilot”, where ordinary life feels empty and robotic, is superficial and misleading. There is so much more there there, but we have to make the effort to see it. Meaning doesn’t force its way in to your awareness. It requires effort, willpower, using your mind’s powers intentionally. And this is a skill.
You can train that skill by picking up a sport, any sport. Which you should do regardless. The positive effects on mind and body and vital spirit cannot be overstated (nor can the downsides of slothful inactivity). But we are discussing a mental skill, which by definition can be practiced in the mind, with the mind and only the mind.
The other way to revive your inner world is through another endangered art, the deliberate use of imagination.
Ask any sarcastic know-it-all and you'll be informed, good and hard, that things like “positive thinking” and “visualization” are woo-woo, hokum, and furthermore bunkum.
There was a time, not that long ago, when the relationship between nature and the human mind was not nearly so settled. To be clear, it isn’t at all settled, scientists and philosophers still have no clear idea of what a mind is or how it operates, and this puzzle hasn’t substantially changed in hundreds of years — yet the redditor armed with The Science is sure that he knows the answers. Striking. Anyhow.
Using your mind creatively, making a deliberate effort to concentrate on an image held before your mind, is a powerful way to lead your thoughts and feelings in new directions.
I hesitate to say more than this just yet. What I suspect that the mind can do, focused and trained, would take us well beyond acceptable reality. That is my intent here, but the currents of conventional wisdom run strong and deep and it’s best to wade into these waters.
Let’s wrap up on that note. I don’t think the mind is capable of “choosing” or “wishing” reality into existence. But I also don’t believe that Sartre’s absolute freedom to chose is what it means to be free. This has been a profoundly destructive idea that continues to hold far too much influence.
Bad things happen. Sartre, like the Stoics long before him, couldn’t admit wrongdoing or evil because no event has meaning. Everything is choice. But some things aren’t choice. Some things are awful. Other things are good, fine, noble, and excellent.
Giving to the victims of tragic flooding is a noble choice, for example.
The aim of freedom is to see reality. Which means to see it not as an outsider watching TV, but as a player in the game.
Life can feel contingent when we fall into the habit of looking at it through a mental lens of pessimism and fatigue. Reality looks like an explosion of random chance events because it couldn’t look any different from up close.
Expanding our vision through mental effort and vision can show you a world completely changed. It’s already there, you just can’t see it by going through the robotic motions of everyday life, looking at the world through a screen. (Metaphorical or not.)
-Matt
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