"What would you do if you were struck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?"
This is the world of the atheist, the pagan and the one of an exilic religion, at it's core. The only rebuttal can be by the mere superficial transient trivialities of life.
It lines up precisely with Nagel's gloomy and apposite work.
The quote from the 1993 picture-play "Groundhog Day"
Francis Schaeffer claims that Sartre asserted (words to the effect) that without an infinite reference point man has no true meaning.
Now, I've not found that specific remark, or anything that directly echoes it in what I've read of Sartre...and life is too short to wade through Being and Nothingness without a PhD at the end, but I have read allusions to that in Existentialism is a Humanism and Nausea.
The idea is also consistent with what I recall of what Jaspers had to say in Philosophy of Existence. One only finds definition in some ultimate act of definition...and that is undefined. And, I would say undefinable when the self-experience is the locus of definition. It is a definition based on nothing which has a grounded basis. It floats arbitrarily unattached and truly undefined. So it has no 'meaning' (whatever that word now means) to even the one seeking definitive meaning.
So, lets clarify the conundrum to "without an infinite reference point there is no real self-knowledge."
We can only know ourselves in relation to others, in interpersonal relationships. There are no possible relationships in the non-personal world and any fake or imagined relations ships are in fact mute.
But if true significance ("meaning") comes only through relationships then there must always be a 'reference' relationship, let's say its one's parents. But this is not final. This reference relationship also needs a 'reference' relationship.
In a cosmos that is finally material, the final 'significance' has to be founded or grounded in some mute material thing or process. But it is inter-personally and therefore finally meaningless. It does not communicate, it reflects or responds to nothing of who one is and the only quality of the "relationship" is blank indifference. A nullity.
Yet we still have an inner quest for significance and live and relate as though this is a real thing.
An infinite regress explains nothing as it never ends in a final ground. It vanishes into the indefinably remote and unconnected other which results in the same abject indifference that the material cosmos characterizes.
True self-knowledge, significance or referentially secure "meaning" must remain the product of relationship. To be true and truly significant there must be a viable relational ground in which it terminates and gives a resolution or definition. A self-existent ground, an independent ontology.
Thus we need the Creator God who is person who sustains and anchors all relationship through being the ground and source of personhood and the final 'relater'.
Now the flip-side for the one who denies a Creator-God, who demands we applaud their faux independence and nonchalant self-applauding bravery.
The atheist's dilemma.
We all seek meaning, and often has it in life yet there can be no real axiological pay-off in a material cosmos, Whence the drive for, often achievement of 'meaning' or true significance? Each relies on an implicit teleology which is denied by the meaningless (literally) atheistic conception of termination.
Yet atheists typically act as though their teleological impulse is real while denying a real basis for the 'meaning' quest. So, what is it? The existentialist's self-defining grand act? But to what point? It all ends in dust and in the end no-one cares!
There is really no point, so an atheists has to explain to him/her-self why they even go to the doctor when feeling ill. That too is finally dust and a pointless way-post on the way to a pointless end.
Some provisional thoughts.
Francis Schaeffer referred to Raphael's painting "The School of Athens" in the detail of the gestures of Plato and Aristotle. Detail below.
The Split Between Nature and Grace
Schaeffer highlights the separation between the "universal" (represented by Plato pointing up) and the "particular" (represented by Aristotle pointing down). This split represents a failure to keep God as the creator of both, leading to an increasing separation between humanity and the Divine.
A friend put it to me that this was possibly not the references being made, rather, Plato is pointing up to "the good" and Aristotle is gesturing to the world as it is, founded on the "unmoved mover".
Together they are depicting a world in its base reality as impersonal, One that makes of personhood and thus man a final nullity.
The rest of philosophy seeks to deal with this nullity...culminating in Nagel's "The View from Nowhere" p. 225:
In a wonderfully succinct conversation (clip) between Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist) and Bill Craig (philosopher/theologian) three great ontological mysteries are discussed:
For Craig these metaphysical questions arouse the ancient philosophical problem of 'the one and the many'. That is, what is the underlying unity of these three seemingly disparate realms of reality: the mental, the abstract and the physical.
These realms are so different, so causally unconnected, yet they come together in our experience, one has to wonder as to the underlying unity that brings them together.
The abstract realm cannot be the source of the mental or physical, because it has no effect on anything. For instance, the number 7 as a number, a concept applied to a quantity, is causally effete: it affects nothing physically
Could the physical realm? But it doesn't give rise to consciousness: it is not able to explain either the mental, or the abstract. It doesn't explain intentionality (the about-ness of our mental states) which no physical object has. Nor is it able to explain itself. It is contingent. It is incapable of grounding logical and mathematical truths, and is plausible finite.
Nor can the abstract realm...it (the mathematical realm) is characterized by necessity--its logically necessary truths--and its plenitude; the infinitude of mathematical objects.
What about the mental?
We know that mental causes have physical effects in our brain-states and actions: one can will to arise from a chair or to speak.
Some philosophers regard the abstract realm as ideas in the mind of the beholder (I tend to disagree, as they seem to be part of the 'deep' structure of reality, but neither physical or mental).
Either way, no human mind can be the source of these realms, only engage in aspects or reflections of them because we are contingent and finite.
The mental realm is plausible the domain of an infinite (limitless, self-existent) consciousness. A mind that has created the physical and underwrites the abstract (without being Platonic) and is necessary.
This gives an underlying unity to the tripartite metaphysical that we live in and affirm.
This is a philosophical perspective, rather than a religious one, except Judeo-Christianity, or more strictly Christianity, which understands a necessary creator who experiences personhood (diversity of mind) it himself (is triune), does not need the physical or abstract realms and is external to the tripartite world and independent of it.
We know that minds can design things, and the view that there is a limitless mind who has designed the physical world on the mathematical blueprint, that it had in mind has a long philosophical history-- back to Philo of Alexandria, who said that the intelligible world, the intelligible cosmos exists in the Logos (Philo says 'mind of the Logos') and is instantiated in the physical world. QED.
In a history of philosophy course, just finishing the unit on Aristotle, I was asked about philosophical ideas that have influenced the church.
This is part of my answer:
The dominating cultural and intellectual influence of 'grand theory evolution' pervades the church and does much to both define its thinking and undermine its mission. At base, evolution is the story that creation is only material and came about purely by unplanned material interactions. Personhood (including God's) is based on material. and god is within the material world.
But the scriptures have it differently. God is distinct from and logically prior to the material world. Personhood (God-in-three-persons' personhood - -intended plural possessive) is before the material world and produced it as the place were we would commune with and worship him and reflect into his creation God, our creator.
Evolution, even if formally rejected by the church, is accepted with its broad denial of the veracity of the days of creation and the very carefully set out 'chronogenealogies' that together put creation into our flow of history. Importantly for the context of the incarnation and the God who is near, they connect us to the Word and actions of a proximate God, rather than the distal god of theistic evolution and theistic materialism (the long age idea) that drive god into a deist absence or a panentheist invisibility.
Following on from Kreeft on books, Brandon Vogt has compiled his philosophy book list.
