Forgetting

It's been a gradual spiral back into nihilism the last couple weeks. Not sure what it is, exactly—probably the semester winding down, and dreary winter coming on. But futility and demotivation have been the name of the game for me the last few weeks. Blech.

Interestingly, the Christian agnostic thing is working out well for my reality-oriented self. So I'd still put myself in that category after all these months—a somewhat successful experiment I suppose. But the problem lies, as it always has, in trying to find the point of it all.

A guy named unenlightened over in philosophyforums.com posted a response to this thread about a teenage existential crisis. Here's some of his thoughts:

You do not trust the answers you have been given, yet you look for the answers of others, knowing there are none. Good! Do not let some other philosophy rob you of you true ignorance, but join yourself with the arrogant people who think that things can be better, that lives on this dream world can be transformed. We dance beyond thought's reach and there is a beauty that knowledge cannot touch.…There is an arrogance in thinking, that takes itself for the reality. And then thought complains that its world lacks richness, meaning, permanence. But it is the poverty of the world of knowledge that is being seen. People work for love, or else they work for an illusion of heavenly or earthly reward. They think of 'after death' because they are lost in thought, lost in an empty scientific world. They make science a new, more powerful religion; it is as if they try to eat the menu, and finding it tasteless imagine a heavenly restaurent where menus taste good. Science will tell you a great deal, but about a world that is infinitely richer than all our descriptions.

Seriously, I think plenty of philosophers would have better careers as poets.

What I get out of that, at first reading, is that our goal as humans is to forget. I've mentioned this before; how at times I've wished I could just forget again, but felt bound by an intellectual integrity preventing a shortcut. Well, I've tried the intellectual integrity thing and unelightened has it right—there is such a poverty of thinking. I want to say that I have no desire to shortcut, but why? What am I obligated to that requires me to be a hero which no one else can sanely be? The two years before I walked away from my faith were the happiest of my life, and all I've wanted since then was to go back. I had learned the art of nearly perfect ignorance. I won't be able to use that method again, but I can learn to strive for the same goal.

Here's to blissful ignorance.