Venom Crystals

I am currently writing an essay on futility and its relation to the meaning of life, based on a paper by William Joske. (W.D. Joske, 'Philosophy and the Meaning of Life' Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1974), 52:93-104).

Joske argues that philosophy is a dangerous activity because almost all flavours of thinking lead to the conclusion that life is futile. No rational philosophical or scientific theory has been able to work out the purpose of Life. Joske writes about life in general, not our individual lives.

Many years ago I downloaded a little DOS program, written by Kevin Solway, called Venom Crystals (Kevin now publishes this as a PDF-file). Venom Crystals is a collection of quotes from Eastern and European philosophy. I started reading the Venom Crystals and some of the texts had a profound interest on me.

Reading Joske's paper, I realised that philosophy is indeed a Venom Crystal. We are hypnotised by its beauty, but the content is poisonous. The more deeply we think about life, the universe and everything, the more we come to realise that life is futile. We do not seem to have any rational justification to think that life has meaning.

This does, however, not imply that we are forced to accept a non-rational system - such as religion - in order to provide meaning to life. Plato writes in his famous myth of the cave that a philosopher is somebody who is able to crawl out of the cave and stare into the bright sun. I think a philosopher is somebody who is able to accept the meaningless of life.

Douglas Adams describes the problem thus:

"You know," said Arthur thoughtfully, "all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."

"Everyone?" said Arthur. "Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know ..."

"Maybe. Who cares?" said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. "Perhaps I'm old and tired," he continued, "but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied." (Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy)

What Slartibartfast is saying here is very profound indeed. He has a very existentialist attitude in that he thinks that the chances of finding out this meaning are 'absurdly remote'. His conclusion is that he should focus on the coastlines - in other words actually lead your life, instead of wasting it by trying to find outs its meaning.

By the way, if the chances of finding out the meaning of life are absurdly remote, then the Infinite improbability Drive would be a good way to find that answer, but that is another story...