A certain strain of philosophy since Nietzsche has steadily and sternly fought to remove what Derrida will name the "transcendental signified." Derrida's fancy coinage means terms that we deploy that function as God-terms, terms that center a metaphysics; in fact, "God" is the most popular transcendental signified. One way to think of it is this: when I make the sound "book" that sound corresponds to an object in the world; however, "God" doesn't. When we say a word like "God" what we invoke is a history of people talking about the word "God" - essentially we talk about the talk about - we don't talk about GOD. (this goes for other such words as "truth" and "just.")
Looking around popular culture, no matter what people say when they are polled - a viciously stupid practice - we live in a secular culture. I don't mean what anybody thinks the culture should be. I mean when the church bells ring there is no unified sense of meaning. For some it's a clock, a louder more structurally sound microwave; for others it represents the spiritual; for some it's just an annoyance. This is all outlined incredibly well in a book too big to finish by the philosopher Charles Taylor called appropriately A Secular Age.
This is both incredibly liberating - I don't want to have to go to Church, but I'm fine with it being there and often I get a kick of the signs in the front of them. And it's incredibly terrifying - at least when the church was the defining institution there was a clear moral order for it's adherents.
So how does one live meaningfully without a center, a culturally unifying principle? How does one escape the pernicious trap of relativism, i.e., is it all up to individuals to just do whatever they want, since who the hell can say otherwise?
Couple a lack of unifying principle with an incredibly seductive range of possible distractions and entertainments and we're really in a pickle.
(Most of this post is coming off of a combination of reading All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, the previously mentioned A Secular Age, and The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel.)
On some level I agreed with the concept "poiesis" as a potential solution, which was presented in "All Things Shining", to the same dilemma you mention above. This idea of nurturing a craft/skill/relationship as a means to bring about sacred moments in life carried a certain amount of relevance, at least for me. It makes sense on the internal level, in which a person may feel certain amount of peace, fulfillment or overwhelming joy while honing a craft or even performing a simple repeated task. It also seems to carry meaning when talking about shared experiences. For example, a musician works to create moods in others through his artistic expression. While everyone in the audience may not be deriving the same feelings/meanings from the music, I think it could still be argued that shared mood is created among the presenter and the participants. Perhaps, this is the self-created "Center", that Dreyfus and Kelly present.
ReplyDeleteWhen I listen to Dreyfus - and you can hear his Heidegger courses for free on Itunes - he's concerned about a calling and following through with your calling. That seems right to me, assuming you have that kind of mobility. Which some don't. Which is why I'm enjoying thinking about David Foster Wallace's book. I just don't find DFW nihilistic. But I do understand the critique they make.
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