The Re-Enchanted Search for Meaning

Re-invigorating philosophy as a means of engaging with the Absolute. 

For eons, philosophers have sought to provide definitive answers to the meaning of life, using philosophy as a means to assuage man’s perennial perturbation in the face of an otherwise meaningless existence. The reservoir of uneasiness inherent to the human condition is where philosophy originates, and where awe finds its veiny delta of expression in the divine grapple with meaning and the Absolute – the transcendent. We seek the transcendent as a staircase to elevate our human state, and soar closer to God and the wonder of the universe. 

Where man’s need to articulate fullness is revealed lies in the intersection between philosophy and artistry. Often elusive of rational scientific taxonomy, cosmological purpose and the unceasing drive to ask transcendent questions of meaning carries with it an inherently elusive nature of the sublime, lending us to forsake any conception of the transcendent and capitulate that, as Annie Dillard contends in her work Holy the Firm, “God despises ideas.” Nonetheless, in a world where the abyss of meaninglessness encroaches, we must posit a world enchanted, scintillating with meaning we do not contrive ourselves: the Absolute. 

In the Western intellectual tradition, the pursuit of philosophy arose from a profound experience of wonder, or, more worrisome, perplexity, vis-à-vis the recurrent human tendency to become disturbed by the unknown. Austrian Poet, Rainer Rilke captured this uneasiness when he penned this excerpt in his Duino Elegies:

“and the resourceful beasts notice quite soon

that we are not very securely at home

in the interpreted world”

Rilke knew well that mankind’s own glaring insecurity is exceptionally apparent, even to the animals, who see us unsettled by a world we did not create. 

One can imagine confusion falling upon the unbothered animals of a Lovecraftian horror, silently observing as a man goes completely mad when met with something otherworldly that he cannot fathom. In similitude, Creation, teaming in mystery, the likes of which man did not create and is not permitted to fully explain, causes man to hide and contrive his own desperate meaning, clinging to his own reality like a barnacle hidden under a ship's shadowy hull. It may seem that, as Dillard illuminates, we are mere visitors in uncharted territory, and “God is at home. We are in the far country.” 

H.P. Lovecraft agreed that what we cannot say much about – the margins of human perception – is not worth the intellectual trouble, perhaps out of fear of what we may find. Taken aback by space, Lovecraft used the sheer infinitude of the cosmos to illustrate how out of place mankind is in light of the monstrous, colossal march of time, which surges through the age of man like a grain of sand forced under the pull of a great wave. Dropped into creation, we are ants in a jungle basin, fearful to venture far from what we know. In the beginning of The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft intimates,

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

Though it is daunting, Philosophy – the “child of wonder” – should remain an open realm of inquiry for matters of weight and value, irrespective of their disturbing nature. It should not be overly analytical to quell our uneasiness in a vain preoccupation with lingering inside the strict confines of the expressible, but instead, as John Cottingham says in On the Meaning of Life, “strain at the limits of the sayable,” as is the “task of religious discourse.” We should philosophize in order to endlessly pursue this wisdom in light of this transcendental value we attribute to meaning, “inseparable from our human way of being in the world.”

If we persist in our insistence that this leap from the phenomenal (material) to the noumenal (immaterial) is not worth taking, we are truly alone in a universe where, as Dillard puts it, “There is no leap; this is evidence of things seen…” Without a leap, without anything to tell us what is real apart from our senses, we cannot faithfully discern anything as real. Only the world we create remains, frantically drilled and hammered to the gills with our own idea of significance, hoping it will stick.

The world needs re-enchantment from the child of wonder and a panacea to the restlessness emergent from relativist philosophy. The Absolute, as Dillard presents it, offers us respite from restlessness and a transcendental significance which all tangential realities hitch themselves to in a desperate clutch. Forgoing a God-blasted, continual plunge into meaninglessness, man’s reach for the divine acts as a conduit between the material and the Absolute. In this way, God begins to be imbued within the banal things of the world, permeating through everything, supplying a weight to things so they hold fast.

For this reason, the restlessness found in the twitching scourge of postmodern philosophy finds its source in its own unhealthy fixation with excessive relativism. Perhaps dignified expression needs to be in accordance with the Absolute, pointed at something other than what we can come up with ourselves as existential in contact with immediate reality. Tranquilizing and ignorantly oversimplifying man’s yearning for meaning, perhaps Augustine is right when he famously proclaims in his Confessions that, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The solution is to pay true attention when interfacing with and seeking communion with what is outside of and transcendent to humanity– a divine grapple where, in Dillard’s words, “eternity clips time,” granting us sovereignty of our experience through genuine, personal relationship with the Absolute. 

In her compilation of essays titled For the Time Being, Dillard illustrates that the time is now to grab our necessity. Let’s not wait.

“It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-- but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”