Irony and Individuality; Why Nihilism is Relatively Meaningless

I have sometimes wondered what culture people come from such that they ask questions like; 'who am I', without having suffered from amnesia. I haven't really been troubled by a problem of cosmological meaninglessness or personal identity crisis. IMO people that have might be originally from a tightly controlled social environment wherein they really are turned out in cookie cutter fashion. I commiserate with people that have been formed in mass produced circumstances rather than with the freedom of individuality.

Escaping from conformity formerly was something of a European problem perhaps. In the United State from the time of the founders people were doomed to be free individuals on the edge of a frontier. Spiritually the frontier never really closed before the 1970s.

Cosmology is neither a source for anxiety about meaninglessness. People exist everywhere as individuals and it was what they think subjectively that they experience as conscious thought experience. It is their freedom to put together whatever package of knowledge and data they can in the best possible configuration within their own capacity.

I suppose the Universe and mass energy might be compared to a pointillist painting with everything made of strings, branes, quarks and atoms including individuals. As in the novel Utopia that means 'nowhere', nowhere is where anyone exists...one place is in an absolute sense (against a transcending Universal backdrop), as central as any other. Even so people are not just quantum dots clumped together by their own free will. Instead there are forces, patterns and destiny that holds people together in addition to elements, planets, stars, dark matter and energy etc.

Individuals exist apart from any other in a unique space-time position. In theory the force of gravity holding them on Earth could be negated with technology and they might relocate anyplace in the temporal Universe. As individuals meaning would still be relative to themselves and their understanding of all of the waves of communication they perceive, and reason about what they find.

Kripke and Quine had somewhat different approaches to nominalism and pluralism, Platonic realism and nominalism (e.g. 'Naming and Necessity' and 'Ontological Relativism'. Particulars and Universals such as Socrates regarded and Plato wrote of were somewhat ahead of Aristotle's great efforts at classifying human knowledge are tools for existential analysis. Irony or self-objectivity about the external social world with one's subjective capacity of thinking for oneself is what all humans necessarily do to a certain extent since they are not automatons only resembling sentient beings. While everything is relative to one's subjectivity, communication is a socially dialectical phenomenon. Words and ideas; meanings- are more phenomenal things to be perceived and used as one constructs their life-project in-the-world as best as they can.

Jesus Christ was/is the truth that makes one free. He was God-for others and one of the three persons who is God. One is phenomenally free yet existent within various physical force fields. People are as unique as anything that is just as one planet is not another though there are billions, and one number is not the same in an infinite series though there is an infinity of them.

Developing introspective and reasoning skills can be fairly said to have entered intellectual history with Socrates, yet he also was an exponent of classical virtue. I believe he should not have been able to precisely define 'the good' yet he does provide a fine exposition of classical virtue and pursuit of the good and knowledge in the Platonic dialogues. That is lacking from modern nihilism and relativism. Socrates and classic virtue did not vacate morality claiming that relativism made everything absolutely subjective. Just as Jesus said the kingdom is within you and the truth shall make you free, Socrates sought to awaken individuals to an inner reflection on virtue and its meaning finding that it would comprise a dialectic with the natural world. It is a kind of natural law as Cicero wrote of later, yet even more virtuous.

Any age may have a spirit of the times. However the Holy Spirit is the sole guide worth following. It is wisdom as well as natural law. It transforms the individual from bondage to nature and unreflective pursuit of baser desires to contemplation of virtue, the good and the divine. With irony and individual might discern that it is his or her own responsibility to improve their intellectual library of understanding of how the Universe or Multiverse functions, to be aware of one's place in the temporal phenomenon and to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior who is prior to space-time in any possible material Universe. 

Salvation does not mean that one blandly, blindly follows the way of the cultural-economic world show wherein 'one struts and frets an hour upon the stage meaninglessly signifying nothing'. Christians may work, construct, design, solve, journey, forgive, innovate and provide relief so far as their capacity permits. One has an infinite sea of words, ideas and Universes of learning and wisdom to consider in this life awaiting the personal eternal transformation to the realm of God, who is good.