Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Prophet of meaninglessness …

… The Silence of Animals by John Gray – review | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


[Gray] offers a negative dialectics that is wonderfully bracing if one is prepared to entertain it. "Accepting that the world is without meaning," he writes, "we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves."

I think the assertion that the world is meaningless is as dubious as the assertion that one has figured out what it means. What I think we have to accept is that the world has meaning that we don't know what that meaning is. We have — thanks to religion, art, and science — clues as to its meaning. But that is all.

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