|
i don't think it's exactly a platitude...klosterman isn't a fool by any means. if you think about it through kant, the thing itself is unknown and unknowable--we only know things, phenomena which are not us, through particular frames of reference, so these things are all beings for us. so even at the most basic level, in the most basic interaction between you and a single object floating in some abstract space, that object is as it is relationally. if you think about the features that are selected to define an object, it is kinda obvious--general physical attributes, something of the relation of parts to a whole, etc.---these are defining features *for us*--which isn't to say that they're arbitrary--but it's also to say that they aren't other than arbitrary, particularly when you shift from something like a rock to a living system.
so now that i typed that, i have to respond to the op---i don't think there is any particular purpose given to ourselves or the world. if there is some god out there somewhere, we don't know anything about it so functionally it's as if there isn't one. i think nietzsche was right about christianity in that the idea that the purpose of life is death or what awaits along with death or after it is a wholly nihilistic way of seeing the world that makes this life secondary and cheap. we're here and we're in this giant circus together--we make the rides, we keep them going, we repeat the logic of the system that enables the circus until we figure out that this is the case and start the slow process of trying to figure out how to be and think otherwise. assuming that's your reaction to repetition. to my mind, repetition elicits that response.
if that's true, then we make the purpose that we take on. we make it in our relations with others and with the world, in what we do, in what we love and in the way we love, in what we devote care and attention to and in what we do not. because the world is big and its time-scale is far bigger than ours, there are possibilities of resonances, with others, with a sense of the past, within the present---some folk think this means there's some higher purpose. i don't, but i don't object if others do--it's the sort of thing that is as you imagine it to be.
there are bigger phenomena that i'm curious about, but i don't necessarily consider them to be Big Questions--they're just interesting and engaging to think about.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|