Thinking INSIDE the Box

Giving In

    Let me take you back to Figure X.  In the last posting, I argued that we should give up the notion that our lives are perfectible, that the hope of perfection as a source of meaning in our lives is an illusion.  We have to look elsewhere for how we might lead a Good life.
    That leads us to continue down the Path with Two Questions.  If life is not perfectible, does it have meaning?  We get to this the node that represents this second question, and we might be tempted to answer a simple, untroubled “Yes, I know what that meaning is.”  End of problem!
    Here we run into a problem with the heuristic device in Figure X.  I am arguing that we should reject the certitude of perfectibility and confront directly the question of meaning in spite of that lack of perfectibility.  But if life has a meaning, and we can be certain of what it is, haven’t we managed to find the certainty that seemed to be have been taken away when we rejected perfectibility?  If we approach this second question in Figure X, and answer it with an affirmation of certitude, there is a bit of a discontinuity, because we are really back on the Path to perfection.  If we know the Way, the Path, the Truth, then we are actually affirming our own fundamentalism and are on the path delineated by answering “Yes” to the question of perfectibility. 
    An example: Assume I decide to reject the certitude offered by a belief in the perfectibility of modern science.  If the scientific search for Truth is not the meaning to life, then what is?  I am at that existential moment, where I have to try to accept my finitude and yet find meaning.  This is a struggle, and I miss the comfort of the certitude of humanism.  It was easier being perfectible!  So, now what do I use to guide my choices?  Well, along comes someone who tells me that they have found the Way.  They offer me a new Rulebook, and all I have to do is believe in it faithfully and without question.  Even though I might at first look like I am on Figure X’s path to faith, I am in fact down on that path to perfectibility, only this time the perfectibility is not material, but transcendent.  I have “given in” to the temptation of perfection.
    This is true whether the offered Rulebook is an orthodoxy of Religion, or the humanism of “the New Atheism.”  By asking me to reject the uncertainty and to believe in the Rules, this person is offering me the comfort of fundamentalism.  And I can see the great appeal of that comfort!
    This is the extraordinary appeal of fundamentalism.  It provides answers; it gives me certainty.  I need only follow the Way, the Rules, and my decisions get made for me.

The Box
 
    So, this “existential moment” mentioned in an earlier posting, where I disavow perfectibility, but have to struggle with meaning, is not a path, but a place, a “Box” we find ourselves in once we accept uncertainty.  (Figure X.)  We can not be sure that our lives have meaning, because that would provide the certitude that is not ours to have.  We can only live our lives in the Box and, day by day, moment by moment, try to orient our lives to a sense of meaning.  We implement that orientation through the choices we make. 
    We are uncertain.  But we are free.