It occurs to me that a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books is the need to solve a mystery for which too few clues have been provided. Harry is constantly confronting situations he did not anticipate and for which he could scarcely have prepared, and which he survives by some combination of instinct, courage, and plain luck.
Is life itself not often a mystery, too? By this, I mean: is it not often the case that you are not sure what you are supposed to do, and who you are supposed to be? For my part, every day is an adventure, because I am making it up as I go along.
As I look at my own past, it seems you have the innocent stage, the banal stage, the sex stage, then the confusion age. You are small and happy initially, because you don’t think about much, and life is about playing, cake, friends and naps.
Then the Gilligan’s Island stage. I have nothing against Bob Denver or the others, but that show is banal. It is trivial. It gives the mind nothing to digest or even chew on. And I watched it daily for years.
Then girls, the chase the apprehension. Excitement, then what?
Ah, you have to find fulfillment. Fulfilling relationships, fulfilling job, fulfilling life. But it never quite gets there for most of us. No doubt there are exceptions. But for most of us, it always seems like there is something missing.
This is, in my view, the Duhkha of Buddhism, the “suffering” which is not really suffering so much as the consciousness of a gap, of a lack, of something you want and need but can’t get, the feeling of Tantalus, never quite able to get that sweet fruit.
We need to be clear that this is nothing new. This is not a disease of modernity. There is nothing new under the sun. Buddha saw this clearly 2,500 or so years ago.
In response to the Existentialists who want to find in this mystery cause for anxiety, angst, I would respond that this is rather a problem to be solved, and that technologies to do so already exist, and have for some time.
To my mind, the “condition of modernity” created by academics, consists first and foremost in indefensible metaphysical pessimism, which finds in the notion of materialistic evolution cause to deny free will–and consequently to enable the notions of impartial history to gain sway, even though such notions are necessarily implemented by specific, time-bound and decision making individuals–and to deny the concept of life continued past their physical deaths.
Both of these assumptions are prone to empirical invalidation, and it seems to me, and has long seemed to me, that progress in philosophical debate is unlikely until the premises upon which our current intellectual malaise are predicated are invalidated from within the scientific paradigm of truth.
This is both possible and necessary.
Few thoughts.