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.
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