WICKES
08-28-2008, 03:10 PM
In another thread I asked why people read. One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, I read is that I would like to find some kind of meaning to life. I find it hard to express this- perhaps because it is more a mood than anything else. The angst of people like Larkin and Beckett is something some people just don't seem to understand (Richard Dawkins for example). Here is my hero Bertrand Russell:
"At Cambridge my interest in philosophy received a stimulus from another motive. The skepticism which had led me to doubt even mathematics had also led me to question the fundamental dogmas of religion, but I ardently desired to find a way of preserving at least something that could be called religious belief...In Hegel I found comfort for a time. There was a curious pleasure in making oneself believe that space and time are unreal, that matter is an illusion, and that the world really consists of nothing but mind. In a rash moment, however, I turned from the disciples to the master and found...confusions and what seemed little better than puns. I therefore abandoned his philosophy. For a time I found satisfaction in a doctrine derived, with modification, from Plato. According to Plato's doctrine... there is an unchanging timeless world of ideas of which the world presented to our senses is an imperfect copy. Mathematics, according to this doctrine, deals with the world of ideas and has in consequence an exactness and perfection which is absent from the everyday world... This kind of mathematical mysticism ...appealed to me. But in the end I found myself obliged to abandon this doctrine also, and I have never since found satisfaction in in any philosophical doctrine that I could accept"
Russell ended up with a kind of 'calm despair' as Tennyson put it. How about you? Where do you find meaning and satisfaction? Does Shakespeare or Dante succeed for you where Plato and Hegel failed poor old Bertie?
"At Cambridge my interest in philosophy received a stimulus from another motive. The skepticism which had led me to doubt even mathematics had also led me to question the fundamental dogmas of religion, but I ardently desired to find a way of preserving at least something that could be called religious belief...In Hegel I found comfort for a time. There was a curious pleasure in making oneself believe that space and time are unreal, that matter is an illusion, and that the world really consists of nothing but mind. In a rash moment, however, I turned from the disciples to the master and found...confusions and what seemed little better than puns. I therefore abandoned his philosophy. For a time I found satisfaction in a doctrine derived, with modification, from Plato. According to Plato's doctrine... there is an unchanging timeless world of ideas of which the world presented to our senses is an imperfect copy. Mathematics, according to this doctrine, deals with the world of ideas and has in consequence an exactness and perfection which is absent from the everyday world... This kind of mathematical mysticism ...appealed to me. But in the end I found myself obliged to abandon this doctrine also, and I have never since found satisfaction in in any philosophical doctrine that I could accept"
Russell ended up with a kind of 'calm despair' as Tennyson put it. How about you? Where do you find meaning and satisfaction? Does Shakespeare or Dante succeed for you where Plato and Hegel failed poor old Bertie?