Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Will to meaning

Often our various enlightened quests for understanding come bogged down with Nietzschean counterarguments: there never are good enough reasons for action, so we stand still, paralyzed by the infinity of the possibilities of the world. Out of this cul-de-sac we must then manouver ourselves: I have come to see us as meaning giving beings, the physical world is observed with varying degrees of accuracy, but those observations don't in themselves contain any self-evident meanings, any automatic significance. So, we give, generously, out of our own beings, and in that sense continuously diminish our separateness, merging, cohering with the world.

Thus I see the nature of our experience in non-rational terms: passionate, wild, untamed, personal. But to see it so, is making a rational conclusion. This is the proposed solution then to the Nietzschean dilemma - even if only a partial one: what exactly is the mechanism of this passionate will to meaning remains an unsolved mystery in the context of any attempt to a universal explanation. We exist locally, are served with local contexts, cultural meanings, and supplied with those tools we then proceed to our semi-independent directions. Any conflicts that arise cannot then be objectively resolved, unless it can be argued that the structure of our experience will neutrally point us to a specific conclusion. That is the question that does remain stubbornly open, not kept open by Nietzsche but by the world.

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