An appetizer: purpose

Let’s start this book in the middle. The main course is a ways off, and I want to give you a taste now.

Let’s talk about purpose. (Purpose is one of the dimensions of meaningness discussed in this book.)

Especially at turning points in life, people ask questions like:

• Is there any purpose at all in living? Or is everything completely pointless?
• What am I supposed to do?
• How can I choose among the many ways I could spend the rest of my life?
• Does everyone’s life have the same purpose, or does everyone have their own?
• Where does purpose come from? Does it have some ultimate source, or is it just a personal invention?

Various religions, philosophies, and systems claim to have answers. Some are complicated, and they all seem quite different. When you strip away the details, though, there are only a half dozen fundamental answers. Each is appealing in its own way, but also problematic. Understanding clearly what is right and wrong about each approach can resolve the underlying problem.

Let’s go through these alternatives briefly. I will explain each one in detail in the middle part of the book.

Five confused attitudes to purpose

Everything has a fixed purpose, given by some sort of fundamental ordering principle of the universe. (This might be God, or Fate, or the Cosmic Plan, or something.) Humans too have a specific role to play in the proper order of the universe.

This is the stance of eternalism. It may be comfortable. If you just follow the eternal law, everything will come out right. Unfortunately, it often seems that much of life has no purpose. At any rate, you cannot figure out what it is supposed to be. Priests or other authority figures claim to know what the cosmic purposes are, but their advice often seems wrong for particular situations.

For these reasons, even people who are explicitly committed to eternalism generally fall into other stances at times.

Nothing has any purpose. Life is meaningless. Any purposes you imagine you have are illusions, errors, or lies.

This is the stance of nihilism. It appears quite logical. It might seem to follow naturally from some scientific facts: everything is made of subatomic particles; they certainly don’t have purposes; and you can’t get purpose by glomming together a bunch of purposeless bits.

It is easy to fall into nihilism in moments of despair; but, fortunately, it is difficult to maintain, and hardly anyone holds it for long. Nevertheless, the seemingly compelling logic of nihilism needs an answer. It turns out that it is quite wrong, as a matter again of science and logic. But because that is not obvious, three other stances try (and fail) to find a middle way between eternalism and nihilism.

The supposed cosmic purposes are doubtful at best, but obviously, people do have goals. There are human purposes no one can seriously doubt: survival, health, sex, romance, fame, power, enjoyable experiences, children, beautiful things. Realistically, those are what everyone pursues anyway. You might as well drop the hypocritical pretense of “higher” purposes and go for what you really want.

This is the stance of materialism. Realistically, most people adopt this stance much of the time. However, at times everyone does recognize the value of altruistic and creative purposes, which this stance rejects. Moreover, most recognize that materialism is an endless treadmill: the enjoyment of new goodies wears off quickly, and then you are left craving the next, better thing.

You can’t take it with you. After you are dead, it is meaningless how many toys you had. What matters is how you live your life: whether you create something of beauty or value for others. You have unique capabilities to improve the world, and it’s your responsibility to find and act on your personal gift.

This is the stance of mission. The problem is that no one actually has a “unique personal gift.” God does not have plans for us. People waste a lot of time and effort trying to find “their purpose in life,” and are miserable when they fail. Besides that, rejecting material purposes causes you to overlook genuine opportunities for enjoyment and satisfaction.

Since the universe (or God) does not supply us with purposes, they are human creations. Mostly people mindlessly adopt purposes that are handed to them by society. You need to throw those off, and choose your own purposes, as an act of creative will.

This is the stance of existentialism.1 It is based on the assumption that if purposes are not objective, or externally given, they must be subjective, or internally created. Existentialism holds out hope for freedom. But it is not actually possible to create your own purposes. Choosing at random would be pointless, and impossible; and what purely personal basis could you have for choosing one purpose over another?

Resolving confusion

Each of these confused stances treats meaning as fixed by an external force, or denies meaning or some aspect of it.

The central message of this book is that meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not.

• 1. Actually, it is more-or-less what existentialists called “authenticity.” Using that term would be confusing, because existentialist “authenticity” hasn’t got all that much to do with the everyday sense of the word.

Preview: eternalism and nihilism

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest, and most extreme, stances toward meaningness.

• Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning.
• Nihilism says that nothing really means anything.

Both these stances are wrong, factually. They are also unworkable, in their implications for living.

However, almost everyone falls into them at times, triggered by particular contexts. Each stance is based on genuine insights, and a powerful, emotionally appealing pattern of thinking. They also can seem to be the only possible alternatives, so we are forced into one by the repulsive qualities of the other.

Understanding the logic of eternalism and nihilism, and the resolution of the fundamental problem they address, is key to unlocking the material covered in this book. Because they are simple and extreme, the logic of these two stances is particularly clear. The other confused stances arise mainly as failing attempts to find some compromise between them.

This page is a brief introduction to eternalism, nihilism, and the third possibility that resolves them. I cover the same topics in much greater detail later in the book.

Eternalism and its discontents

Eternalism and nihilism are both responses to the ambiguity of meaningness. In personal experience, meanings seem to resist focus, shift, and come and go. Moreover, people disagree about what things mean. Perhaps meanings are just a matter of opinion? Meaning is important enough that this uncertainty is emotionally unacceptable.

The strategy of eternalism is to deny the ambiguity. Despite appearances, it says, everything does have a clear and definite meaning, which is not merely subjective. We might not perceive it, or we might mistake it, but it exists.

If meanings are objective, not human creations, it may seem they must come from some ultimate, transcendant source. In many systems, that is a God. In others, it is an abstraction, like Fate or Reason or the Absolute. These are supposed to provide the sole source of meaning, purpose, value, and ethics. I refer to any such source as an eternal ordering principle or Cosmic Plan.

Luckily, there is no eternal ordering principle, so eternalism is false as a fact-claim. Arguments about that never seem to persuade anyone, however. So I take this hyper-atheism for granted, and instead ask: what are our options if eternalism is wrong?

Here it is helpful to understand what works, and doesn’t work, about eternalism (and the other confused stances) emotionally, rather than in terms of truth.

The appeal of eternalism is that questions of life-purpose and ethics have clear, simple answers. If you act in accordance with this Cosmic Plan, you are guaranteed a good outcome. You can be assured that seeming chaos and senseless misery are all orderly parts of the will of an all-good principle.

Even if it were factually true, eternalism could not deliver on this sales pitch. The compelling emotional logic breaks down in some contexts. In those situations, adopting the eternalist stance makes you think and act in ways that lead to big trouble.

It is difficult to see how the suffering caused by earthquakes could be willed by a benevolent God, or meaningful, or anything other than disasters that just happened. The difficulty of maintaining willful blindness to meaninglessness is an obstacle to eternalism. It is hard not to fall into the confused stance that most things are God’s will, but not the bad bits. Once you admit that some things are meaningless, the logic of eternalism starts to fall apart.

To defend against that, you have to hallucinate a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, and all the world needs is love.

Threats to this vision must be destroyed. Eternalist kitsch rapidly switches to self-righteous vengeance when contradicted.

Eternalism also requires you to submit to the Cosmic Plan, to do as it demands, rather than pursuing your own goals. It is often unclear what God wants you to do, and sometimes what he wants is insane and harmful. Then you either do the apparently right thing, which erodes your commitment to his ethical code, or you follow the prescription. If that has the expected bad result, you must blind yourself to that, and harden yourself against the temptation to weaken the code to fit reality.

Much good is left undone because eternalism did not recommend it, and much harm is done in its name. We also lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

Nihilism and its discontents

Nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that eternalism is false and unworkable. Most events are meaningless; meaning is not objective; there is no Cosmic Plan.

Nihilism then simply inverts the core claim of eternalism: everything is really meaningless. Seeming meanings are illusory or arbitrary or subjective, and therefore unreal or unimportant.

This stance is unworkable. Meaning is obvious everywhere, and it takes elaborate intellectualization to explain it away. Attempting to live without significance, purpose, or value leads to rage, anguish, alienation, depression, and exhaustion.

Kitsch is worthy of contempt, but—through fear of being duped again—we extend contempt beyond kitsch to anything that affirms meaning. This makes defiant nihilism actively hostile to more-or-less everything, but particularly beauty, virtue, kindness, and whatever else makes life worth living.

Eternalism blinds us by a simple effort of will, or faith. Such simple stupidity is insufficient for nihilism: it is not possible to use mere force to fool ourselves that there is no meaning in the world. Instead, nihilism uses intelligence against itself to produce stupidity. Somehow meaning must be explained away by intellectual sleight-of-hand. A theory is needed that can distract us from the obvious. This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or so brilliantly insightful as to dazzle us into submission. This intellectual stupidity masquerades as intelligence.

Denying meaning blinds one to beauty, making all reality dull gray. Denying purpose produces paralysis, with no possibility of choice and so no action. Denying significance suggests that there is no urgency to do anything about it.

In depression, you recoil from the overwhelming vastness and complexity of reality. You feel lost in space. You put yourself in a box to create comforting limits. Nihilism shuts down emotions to deny passion.

A false dichotomy, and failing compromises

When in the eternalist stance, it may seem that the only alternative is nihilism, and vice versa. Because each has obvious dire faults, we adopt whichever seems less bad in a particular situation. Because one looks worse, we try to stabilize ourselves in the other, declaring allegiance to it and viewing the opposite as the enemy. But this is impossible. Instead, we often squirm back and forth between the two in a sneaky, panicked way. It’s common for people to switch between eternalism and nihilism repeatedly in the space of a few minutes. Once you start to see this pattern, and catch yourself doing it, it becomes funny.

An alternate strategy is to try to find a compromise. Without thinking about it carefully, we suppose that the world is somewhat governed by an eternal organizing principle (even if we are staunch atheists), and that the world is also somewhat horribly meaningless (even if we are committed eternalists). Some things, we suppose, have definite meaning, and others are definitely meaningless.

The various “confused stances” discussed later in this book arise in this way. Each is a bargain in which we reluctantly acknowledge meaninglessness in some parts of life, deny it in others, and try to get the world to accept that. But it doesn’t; so every compromise causes new trouble, and fails.

The wrong idea underlying all confused stances is that things must be either definitely meaningful or else effectively meaningless. Or, if meaning is not objective, it must be subjective. But these are not the only possibilities.

Completion: meaningness

I have coined the word “meaningness” to express the ambiguous quality of meaningfulness and meaninglessness that we encounter in practice. According to the stance that recognizes meaningness, meaning is real but not definite. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is neither given by an external force nor a human invention.

I call this a “complete stance” because it acknowledges two qualities: nebulosity or indefiniteness, and pattern or regularity. A complete stance does not deny any aspect of meaningness.

From point of view of the complete stance, eternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law.

Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable

I was inspired to write this book when I saw many of my friends struggling with the question “what is my true purpose in life?”

This struggle makes you miserable. Finding your “true mission” is difficult. It might seem that it ought to be obvious, but my friends seemed to fail repeatedly. There is no pragmatic, straightforward means to discover your mission; you need to use non-ordinary techniques, such as psychotherapy, divination, or dream work. At times they would be excited because they had finally found it—but a month or two later, they realized they had been mistaken. What they had thought was their true mission turned out not to be. Then they would lapse into depression, for months or years, during which they seemed to do nothing much—just surviving. Of course, they said, since they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing, it was not surprising that they weren’t accomplishing anything.

I think the reason you can’t find your mission in life is that there is no such thing. That answer seems unacceptable, though, if there is only one alternative: materialism.

If there is not something I was put on earth to do, perhaps all that’s left is to join the rat-race of accumulation and personal gratification? But everyone understands that is unsatisfying: a dead end. We have tried materialism, and seen that it fails. You can pursue money, sex, popularity, and power for a while, but either you find you can’t get enough, or it turns to cardboard in your mouth when you do.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Some people pursue mission relentlessly; others materialism. Most flip-flop. In any case, these alternatives both produce disappointment, depression, at times anguish.

This is an example of what we could call “existential suffering” or “spiritual suffering.” It is suffering due to one’s relationship with meaningness. Purpose is one dimension of meaningness.

I believe this kind of suffering is unnecessary. It is caused by wrong attitudes toward meaningness. Those can be replaced with accurate ones, and then you are freed from it.

Of course, most suffering is not existential, or spiritual. Most suffering is practical: concrete circumstances are unsatisfactory. I haven’t got much to say about practical suffering, except that it often has practical solutions. Spiritual suffering is eradicated by replacing supposedly-spiritual problems (like “what is my life purpose?”) with practical ones—which you may be able to make progress on.

Mission and materialism are not the only possibilities. You can, instead, do things that you enjoy and that are useful to others.

“But how do I know what to dedicate my life to?” Wrong question… a good question to ask instead is “What is something I can do now that will be both enjoyable and useful?” That’s a practical problem. You can find answers without using religious or therapeutic voodoo.

It’s an unattractive question, however. “What is my true mission in life?” promises that if only you can find the answer, and you throw your whole self into your mission, you will be a very special person. Along the way, you will have certainty, and when you die, you will die justified.

“What’s something useful and enjoyable I can do now?” prompts the answer “Who cares—so what?” Mere usefulness and enjoyability doesn’t sound good enough. This “complete stance”—of enjoyable usefulness—is emotionally unattractive at first. Once accepted, though, it does eliminate the anguish of an existential dilemma. If you can let go of the grandiosity that leads you to imagine that some special task awaits you, and the false hope that getting enough of what you want would make life satisfactory, you can be useful and enjoy yourself. That letting-go takes some doing; I will suggest ways to go about it.

This book addresses a series of dilemmas of this sort. I call them “dimensions of meaningness.” Each dimension has a limited number of possible approaches, or “stances.”

The commonly available confused stances are each unworkable, because they are based on misunderstandings of how meaning works. For example, it is easy to waste a huge amount of emotional energy trying to be special or ordinary; to while your life away in mindless conformity or unrealistic rebellion; to play the victim or fail when you attempt to take total responsibility for your world. Adopting those stances makes you miserable.

For each dimension, I suggest an uncommon, alternative stance that resolves the misunderstanding, and turns a spiritual problem into a practical one.

Acknowledgements

This book draws on Buddhist philosophy, and on the Western intellectual tradition: the many disciplines concerned with meaningness, particularly philosophy. I would like to thank my teachers and colleagues in both these areas.

My Lamas, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen, have been the greatest influence on my understanding of eternalism, nihilism, monism and dualism, and their manifestations in everyday life. I am grateful to them for their kindness and openness, for exceptionally clear, practical, and profound explanations, and for their transmission of Buddhist method as well as understanding. They are probably mainly responsible for whatever unusual insights may be found here. However, this is explicitly not a Buddhist book. Where it does not accord with Buddhist doctrine, that is either because I misunderstood it, or did not intend to conform to it. Such deviations should not be interpreted as errors in their teaching.

Beth Preston has long been my mentor and guide to the Western philosophical tradition. Her knowledge and understanding is both deep and unusually broad, covering both the analytic and Continental schools. Her taste is impeccable and her rigor intimidating. Her skepticism regarding the ideas presented here has repeatedly forced me to rethink and reformulate. I have tried to adopt some of her intellectual care and precision, and to rein in my tendency to produce sweeping generalizations and unsupported pronouncements. If my enthusiasm sometimes outstrips my commitment to scholarly values, it is not for want of feedback from her.

I would like to thank also my other teachers in both traditions, my academic colleagues, my Buddhist sangha, and many friends who have contributed in various ways. Unfortunately they are too many to enumerate, but I am particularly grateful to:

• Naljorma Rin’dzin Pamo, my primary interlocutor, with whom I discuss most of the topics in this book in depth;
• Ngakma Zér-mé Dri’mèd, whose oral teaching on emptiness and form was fundamental to my understanding;
• Naljorpa Chhi’mèd Künzang, whose critique of an early version of this work led to an important reformulation;
• The (long defunct) “gravel” discussion group at M.I.T., the most stimulating intellectual environment I have encountered, whose members included particularly Beth Preston and Phil Agre, with whom I worked out very early versions of some of the ideas presented here;
• Robert Ellis, whose work in integrating the Buddhist understanding of eternalism and nihilism with elements of the Western philosophical tradition precedes mine, and with whom I have a valuable on-going discussion of these issues;
• Lucy Friedland, a conversation with whom sparked the writing of this book.

I would also like to thank the readers of this site, and especially those who leave thoughtful, useful, and friendly comments. I am writing the book on-line in order to start a conversation and to gain feedback, which will greatly improve it.

Stances trump systems

Mostly, people think about thinking about meaning in terms of systems. (By “systems,” I mean religions, philosophies, political ideologies, psychological frameworks, and so on.) But I think that is not how we actually think about meaningness.

When I say “think about thinking about,” I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,” the answer is something like “I’m a Christian / existentialist / progressive / Jungian.” Or more likely, nowadays when few people want to commit to a single system, they may mention several.

It seems to me that this is a mistake. In practice, when we actually need to make decisions, we do it mainly on the basis of stances, not systems.

Stances are simple, compelling patterns of thinking and feelings concerning meaningness. For example: “I’m an ordinary guy,” or “the only real purpose in life is to squeeze as much pleasure out of it as you can before you die,” or “good people follow the rules,” or “everyone is responsible for their personal reality.”

Whatever system, or systems, someone believes in, they probably often adopt stances that contradict it. For example, Christians, in everyday life, often act on the basis of materialism. (I have never been a Christian, but I know this by reading books by Christian pastors, who say this is a big problem.) Progressives also fall into materialism—another contradiction. Many professed Christians say that “all is one, really”—the stance of monism—which goes against the central teaching of Christianity. It also contradicts the central teaching of Buddhism, but many people think “all is one” is an essential Buddhist message.

Systems are big, complicated things with lots of details you are supposed to believe and do. Systems have salespeople, who argue passionately in their favor.

Stances are very simple, and don’t require any specific beliefs or practices. No one explicitly promotes them. You pick them up automatically from our cultural “thought soup.” They are the ways people talk about meaning in soap operas and cafes.

Confused stances are insidious, because they are unnoticed. Because no one argues for them, no one argues against them. They are memes, mental viruses that people propagate by talking, without awareness of them.

Systems can help stabilize particular stances. Christianity, for instance, tries to stabilize eternalism—the idea that everything has a definite meaning given by God. Its detailed ideology provides support for this idea. If you are Christian and wobbling out of eternalism, it provides things to say to yourself to counteract that.

This works only to a limited extent. The experience of Christians is that “everyone falls into temptation.” That is not only the temptation of unethical actions—more seriously, it is acting on the basis of stances that contradict the religion’s core teachings.

Stances are unstable

Image courtesy Berkeley Robinson

In times of crisis, longing, or doubt, one is likely to express one’s feelings to friends somewhat like this:

A lot of the time I don’t know what I should be doing. I mean, regular life is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? I know I must have been put on earth for some reason. I’m an artist, really. I’m not one of those mindless drones who sleepwalks through life. I can see what’s real; that’s the artist’s job. Discover yourself, discover reality. But I’m not sure what my artistic medium is meant to be.

Life basically just sucks, mostly. It seems like there has to be a better way; we can’t be meant to be miserable all the time. There has to be some ultimate purpose to existence.

I guess I do believe in God. I mean, maybe not as some guy up in Heaven, but something way bigger than us. Stuff doesn’t just happen; there has to be a reason for things. I mean, ultimately, it’s all one, isn’t it? I guess you could say I’m spiritual, sort of, but not religious. Organized religion is stupid. It’s all phony niceness. Real life isn’t like that. People walk all over you if you are too nice. You have to look out for yourself.

A lot of the time I think, OK, I’ll do a regular job, I can fit in, I can make a steady salary instead of being a starving artist. I’ve done that, you know? But the corporate world is all rigged against you. You can’t get ahead. We should sweep that away and create a just society, one that works for real people, not the greedy CEOs and politicians. They are the ones making war and polluting the earth and stuff.

I want to make the world a better place. I think most people do. I’ve got some friends who are political, you know, trying to change things. But I don’t see that they are going to make any difference. And anyway, in the long run, what difference could it make? In a hundred years, we’re all dead, and no one’s going to care. Might as well live for the moment, you know!

Because the confused stances fail to match reality, they are all unstable. As mind-states, they come and go. We flip-flop between them.

The speaker in the monologue above goes through a dozen stances in the space of a minute or two: nihilism, mission, true self, specialness, eternalism, causality, monism, materialism, reasonable respectability, victim-think, romantic rebellion, and back to mission and materialism again. (You might like to re-read it and pick these out.)

This invented speech may be somewhat exaggerated; usually stances persist a little longer, and it would be unusual to get through so many in a single moan-session. (He sounds like he might have ingested some substance that makes mental states less stable.) But I have often listened sympathetically as a friend in crisis has gone through several contradictory stances in an hour or so.

Because we aren’t aware of stances at all, we don’t notice this happening. We don’t see how dramatically we contradict ourselves.

Once you are aware of relating to meaningness in terms of such stances, you can catch yourself (and your friends) sliding from one to another like this. The flip-flopping is often accompanied by anxiety, which can produce defiant negativity or fake sweetness. Those are one clue that you are caught up in a confused stance. Stances allied to nihilism come with defiant negativity, and those allied to eternalism make you sound like a Hallmark greeting card.

Each confused stance tends to lead to one of a small number of following stances. Each stance has a logic that fails as you pursue it. As that becomes obvious, there is a natural next thought that slides you into a following stance without noticing.

For example, in the stance of respectability, it makes sense to have an ordinary job and fit in. But this involves cutting off your creativity, which is unacceptable. Recognizing this, you may move to the stance of victim-think, if you feel coerced into conformity. That makes you angry, and you think of forcibly changing conditions, in an unrealistic way: the stance of romantic rebellion.

This instability is one reason stances trump systems. No matter how determined you are to stick to a system, the stances connected with it are likely to slide out from under you.

Later in the book, I discuss each of the stances in detail, and as part of that I look at the logic that can lead from each to others. That lets you anticipate the wrong moves your thinking is likely to make, and helps counter them.

The antidotes to this whole process are the complete stances. Unfortunately, they too are unstable. They are unstable not because they fail to fit reality, but because they don’t offer the emotional pay-offs the confused stances do.

Once one has decided that the confused stances are unworkable, and that the complete stances are accurate, one can work toward stabilizing the complete ones.

Also, one can work on further destabilizing the confused stances, so they do not persist. Simply recognizing them, and seeing the logic of how they flop from one to the next, is one way to do that.

Fixation and denial

There are two fundamental ways to try to reject nebulosity: by fixating or denying meaningness.

Fixation

Fixation is the strategy of insisting that meanings are clear, definite, permanent, discrete, and objectively certain.

Meaningness is like open ocean: vast, unpredictable, always in motion.1 When meaningness appears murky, chaotic, and disputable, fixation is a natural response.

In fixation, you cling to relatively solid fragments of meaningness and try to lash them together into a raft. Standing shakily on a bundle of splinters, you visualize grass beneath your feet, and try not to feel the rocking of the sea. “Here we are on dry land,” you proclaim. “Here we will build a fortress to keep us safe from the chaos of uncertainty.”

You might as well try to build your castle on a cloud. Since meaningness is inherently nebulous, it cannot work. Whenever an unusually big wave comes along, it tips you off your raft and back in the sea. Later in this book, in the eternalism chapter, we’ll look in detail at common ways you may respond to these inevitable failures. Among these are sentimentality and self-righteous aggression.

Another common reaction: when your own attempts at fixation fail, you may invoke an eternal ordering principle, such as God. These are invented as omnipotent, external forces that fixate meaningness. “God works in mysterious ways. This senseless horror is all part of the Cosmic Plan, even though we cannot understand why.”

Denial

Denial is the strategy of refusing to admit that meaningness exists, or insisting that it is unimportant, for example because it is purely subjective.

When it is obvious that certainty is impossible, that meanings can never be established objectively, that ultimately there is nothing to stand on, denial is a natural response. Meaningness seems too fickle to be relied on. Better to abandon it altogether. Better to try to live in the black emptiness of outer space.

Attempts at denial also always fail, when the pattern of meaningness becomes obvious. No matter how far you are from a planet, the sky is spangled by pinpoint lights of distant stars.

Again, in the nihilism chapter, we’ll investigate common responses to failures of denial. These include defiant rage, intellectualization, and depression.

Mirror images

Fixation and denial are both rejections of nebulosity; and in a sense they are the same rejection. Each fixation is also a denial, and vice versa. Each fixation denies the negation of what it fixates.

For example, the stance of ethical totalitarianism fixates a moral code; but that implies denying ethical ambiguity and freedom. Conversely, ethical nihilism denies all ethical imperatives, which implies fixating ethical uncertainty.

• 1. I have taken this metaphor from Will Buckingham’s remarkable book Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories, about the failure of ethical eternalism.

Nebulosity

“Nebulosity” means “cloud-like-ness.” Meaningness is cloud-like. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.

Nebulosity is the key to understanding confusions about meaningness. That is a central point of this book.

Cloud-like

“Nebulosity” refers to the intangible, transient, amorphous, non-separable, ambiguous nature of meaningness.1

• From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it.
• If you watch a cloud for a few minutes, it may change shape and size, or evaporate into nothing. But it is impossible to find an exact moment at which it ceases to exist.
• Clouds often have vague boundaries and no particular shape.
• It can be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins.
• It can be impossible to say even whether there is a cloud in a particular place, or not.

Meanings behave in these ways, too.

The nebulosity of meaningness

“Meaning” can apply to many things: words, art works, or “life,” for example. The meanings even of words can never be fully specified. To varying degrees, they are ambiguous. Art is more extensively indefinite. The matters that might be called “spiritual”—which are the main topics of this book—are still more nebulous.

Because “spiritual” concerns are so insubstantial, perhaps it would be useful to look first at the nebulosity of the meaning of an art work, such as a piece of instrumental music.

• When you think of the piece as a whole, its meaningfulness can seem quite solid. But when listening to it, you cannot say “this bit means this, and that bit means that.” The meaning becomes thin and wispy, in a sense.
• What an art work means can change over time. Some songs that were tremendously meaningful when I was fifteen seem quite meaningless now. The meaning of the religious carvings of the Rapanui people of Easter Island is mostly permanently lost.
• It is very difficult to say anything about what instrumental music means—even when you are sure it is highly meaningful.
• Music comes in separate pieces (such as songs), maybe with separate meanings. But life does not come in well-defined chunks. “Spiritual” meanings are not clearly separable; they flow or shade into each other.
• Meaningfulness and meaninglessness also shade into each other. Meaningness has infinite gradations of intangibility. It can be impossible to say whether something has meaning or not.

People often disagree about meanings. This can be because one person is right and the other wrong. However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is inherently ambiguous.2 It is a feature of reality, not of knowledge. As we will see later, meaningness is not objective—but it is not subjective, either.

Nebulosity is unwelcome

The nebulosity of meaningness causes various problems: practical, social, and psychological. (Much of this book describes such problems.) Often, people would like to get rid of nebulosity, or pretend that it is not there.

Confused stances are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known.

Because meaningness is both nebulous and real, these confused stances fail, and cause new, worse problems.

Complete stances acknowledge nebulosity, and its inseparable partner, pattern.

• 1. I will not give a precise definition of “nebulosity” here. Instead, I present analogies. I apologize if the meaning of “nebulosity” seems frustratingly nebulous. I find that unsatisfactory myself. I hope that an understanding of the word will emerge from its use later in the book. I believe that a rigorous definition is possible; but it would be highly technical. I explain some reasons for that in my page on nebulosity and “emptiness.”
• 2. In the language of philosophy, nebulosity is an ontological fact, not an epistemological one. As a result, my accounts of eternalism and nihilism differ somewhat from the related accounts given by Robert Ellis. His philosophy is exclusively epistemological, and rejects ontological claims altogether.

Confused stances come in pairs

Confused stances are strategies for avoiding accepting nebulosity. Each confused stance applies the basic methods of fixation and denial to different aspects of meaningness.

This means that these wrong ideas come in mirror-image pairs. In each pair, one stance fixates what the other denies, and vice versa.

Mirror images

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Eternalism attempts to fixate all meaningness. Nihilism attempts to deny all meaningness.

Because meaningness is always both nebulous and patterned, eternalism and nihilism both always fail.

Each of the other confused stances denies some aspect of meaningness and fixates another.1 Therefore, they are attempts at compromise between eternalism and nihilism. These increasingly complicated compromises also fail; every dimension of meaningness is both nebulous and patterned.

As a simple example, the stance of true self fixates personal continuity. It insists that there is a mental thing within us that is stable, well-defined, and fully separate: the self. It denies personal nebulosity: the inaccessibility, incoherence, variability, transience, and patchwork quality of this supposed self. The mirror-image stance of no-self fixates personal discontinuity. It denies the pattern of the self: the personality quirks, projects, memories, and relationships that make up an individual.

As a more complicated example, the stances of mission and materialism both fixate personal purpose. However, they agree that purposes can be divided into “eternal” and “mundane” ones. Mission then fixates eternal purposes and denies mundane ones. Materialism fixates mundane purposes and denies eternal ones.

Each of these pairs polarizes meaningness into two unworkable extremes. Because both sides of the polarity refuse to recognize nebulosity (in opposite ways) both fail. Surely the truth lies somewhere in-between? Unfortunately, no: finding the middle ground cannot resolve these dilemmas.

• 1. One can say that even eternalism and nihilism do this, in a sense. Eternalism attempts to deny meaninglessness, and nihilism attempts to fixate it.

No middle way

Wrong ideas about meaningness show up as pairs of polarized, opposite stances. These appear to be extreme views. Surely the truth can be found somewhere between?

Unfortunately, no. The error underlying all confused stances is their refusal to allow nebulosity. Even if some middle ground could be found, it too would reject nebulosity, and so would also be unworkable.

In fact, it’s usually impossible to find a “middle” position anyway. In each pair of confused stances, one categorically denies what the other fixates.

For instance, the stance of true self holds that there is a mysterious essence of the person; the stance of selflessness holds that there is none. The reality of selfness might be described as “between” these extremes, once it is found. But “in the middle” is not a helpful hint for where to look. What is halfway between existence and non-existence?1

To resolve confusions about meaningness, the helpful instruction is to head in the direction of nebulosity. Since both true self and selflessness are evasions of nebulosity, that direction is at right angles to the line between them.

Some confused stances do arise as attempts at compromise, or at balancing or synthesizing two extremes. I call these “muddled middles.”

Here’s an example.

• The stance of mission holds that only “eternal” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is that you get to feel morally superior and special for pursuing only lofty goals. Its cost is a failure to engage with the mundane aspects of life. Those aspects can be highly satisfying, and can become messy problems for yourself and others if neglected.
• The mirror-image stance, materialism, holds that only “mundane” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is the simplicity and directness of pursuing your own pleasures. Its cost is losing the benefits of eternal purposes, for oneself and others.
• The muddled middle mingles materialism and mission, and fixates both of them. It is the attempt to satisfy both eternal and mundane purposes simultaneously. For example, you might pursue fame leading a media campaign to save starving Africans, or pursue groupies and a lucrative recording contract as an “alternative” “rebellious” musician.

In fact, most motivations are mixed. When pursuing eternal purposes, one usually hopes for some mundane reward, even if it is only a casual compliment from a friend. This is often sleazy and covert. Authentic compassion and creativity are possible; but there is generally a self-aggrandizing tendency operating at the same time.

This muddled middle preserves both the self-righteous justification of mission and the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism. So it combines the emotional payoffs of its parent stances. But it also combines their costs. It tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because you have to pretend that is not what you seek), and also the unselfconscious compassionate joy of accomplishing eternal purposes (because you have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

The complete stance that resolves the mission-materialism polarity also recognizes both eternal and mundane purposes. However, it allows both to be nebulous. It strips both sorts of purposes of their selfish emotional payoffs, and also avoids the unnecessary emotional costs of both mission and materialism.

• 1. Buddhism often speaks of a “middle way” between extremes, including the extremes of existence and non-existence. Although this can be useful when understood in specific Buddhist contexts, it seems unhelpful and potentially confusing elsewhere. For instance, in Western thought, based in Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophy, moderation in all things is often recommended. I am not a great fan of moderation; that is not the resolution I recommend in this book. The “complete stance” I advocate accepts and incorporates extremes. In this, my approach is more similar to those of Nietzsche and Vajrayana Buddhism than to the Western or Buddhist mainstreams.

Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning

The core of this book is a method for resolving confusions about meaningness.

The method can be applied to many sorts of issues. Any topic that involves meaning and meaninglessness I call a “dimension of meaningness.” (These include, for instance, ethics, purpose, and value.)

For any dimension, the method asks:

• How does nebulosity affect the subject? That is, what makes the issue ambiguous, uncertain, changeable, or impossible to categorize?
• Why is this nebulosity unattractive? What negative emotions does it provoke?
• How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging nebulosity? These two strategies try to nail the issue in place, or deny that it exists at all. They produce pairs of “confused stances,” or wrong attitudes to the subject. Why are fixation and denial appealing in this area?
• How do fixation and denial fail? (You cannot nail clouds down, but they are still real.) What are the consequences of this failure?
• Consider the possibility that the nebulosity is unavoidable. This means abandoning fixation and denial. It produces the “complete stance” for this dimension of meaningness. What are the consequences of the complete stance?
• Typically, the complete stance is actually better than the confused ones, but it seems less attractive. How can one overcome this emotional barrier, in order to adopt the complete stance?

This explanation may seem conceptual and abstract at this point. I hope soon to give you an experiential, concrete understanding of it, as well.

This book is meant to be practically useful. Most of it consists of detailed applications of the method to many different dimensions of meaningness.

Not a general dialectic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

You might misinterpret the method of resolution I presented on the last page as a “general dialectic,” or means of resolving all false oppositions.

(If you didn’t think that, or if the last sentence made no sense, skip this page. It’s for logic geeks only.)

General dialectics are a big deal in Continental philosophy, particularly in German Idealism. They are popularly associated particularly with Hegel. The system is usually described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.1

The method of resolution used in this book critically involves the concept of nebulosity. It proceeds by eliminating mistaken fixations and denials of nebulosity. This method cannot resolve false oppositions in which rejection of nebulosity is not the underlying problem.

It is possible that this method could be seen as an instance of some general dialectical system. I would not find that interesting. It is nebulosity, not dialectic, that interests me.

Dialectics are also a big deal in Buddhist philosophy. The central example is Nagarjuña’s explanation of emptiness in terms of “not existence, non-existence, both, or neither.”

There is probably some sort of connection between nebulosity and emptiness. However, I think non-existence is mostly a red herring, and Nagarjuña’s four-fold logic has no obvious similarity with the method I present.

• 1. According to the Wikipedia, Hegel himself had a different formulation.

Confusion, completion, misery and joy

Earlier, I observed that misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable. I suggest that shifting from confused stances to complete stances can eliminate this “spiritual” suffering.

That is the point of this book. I hope it can help accomplish a positive transformation of your experience of meaningness. It is not meant to be an academic, philosophical analysis.

A couple pages back, I described a method for resolving confusions about meaningness. That explanation may have seemed dry and abstract.

On this page, I sketch one example. Although the discussion here is brief, I hope it is concrete enough that you begin to see how and why the method might work to replace unnecessary misery with joy.

An example: ethics

Let’s look at the dimension of ethics. Here are brief answers to the series of questions asked in the method of resolution.

(I will give much more detailed answers later in the book. I’ve also written more about this approach to ethics elsewhere.)

How does nebulosity manifest in ethics?

We are often faced with moral dilemmas, in which it is unclear what we should do. Usually these are situations in which different ethical norms conflict. For example, one should usually be truthful, but sometimes telling the truth would result in harm.

There doesn’t seem to be any general way of resolving such problems. Similar situations often seem to have dissimilar ethical implications; right action seems to have unlimited dependence on the context.

Why is this unattractive?

We want to do the right thing, but don’t always know what that is. This uncertainty can provoke intense anxiety.

Often we do harm that later we bitterly regret, and punish ourselves accordingly. However, we may not see how we could have avoided it, given ethical uncertainty.

How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging the nebulosity of ethics?

One can try to fixate ethics by formulating totalitarian ethical codes that are supposed to tell you what to do in every situation. This is attractive because it suggests that it is possible to avoid ever being morally culpable—so long as you always follow the code.

Or, one can deny that ethics are meaningful at all, and refuse to take moral responsibility for your actions. This is another way of avoiding culpability.

How do these confused stances fail?

Ethical situations are unboundedly complex and variable. Any finite, fixed set of rules will sometimes require actions that are obviously harmful, for no reason beyond “that’s the rule.” In such cases, you are faced with the horrible choice of violating rules you believed sacred, or creating needless suffering by obeying them.

A fixed code also will fail to promote some beneficial actions in situations that present unusual opportunities.

Refusing to acknowledge ethical imperatives can sometimes work to one’s personal advantage. Obviously, it tends to harm others, though.

It also seems that humans are incapable of consistent ethical nihilism. Humans evolved to be ethical; that is just how our brains work. It’s usually impossible to avoid all shame and guilt. Even sociopaths, whose brains lack ethical function, do not often seem to have satisfactory lives.

What if ethics were unavoidably nebulous?

This opens the possibility of ethical responsiveness coupled with ethical freedom.

If ethics are unavoidably nebulous, in many situations there is no one “right thing” to do. Instead, there are alternatives with subtle trade-offs. We have the duty to pay close attention to the details, while also maintaining openness to the situation as a whole.

We also often have the privilege of choice. Where there is no definite right answer, we are free. We can choose at will. We also have room for creative improvisation: finding ethical solutions that are not applications of general principles.

This stance requires letting go of the fantasy that we could always avoid culpability. We have to accept that, inevitably, we will sometimes make ethical mistakes.

Regretting ethical mistakes makes us less likely to repeat them. However, acknowledging their inevitability means that we can let go of ethical anxiety. Ethical maturity is measured by the ability to find good-enough solutions to ethical problems, not by the amount you punish yourself.

What helps adopt the complete stance?

We need to destabilize the confused stances, by understanding their defects, and stabilize the complete one, by understanding its advantages.

In this case, confusion is destabilized by understanding that it is not feasible to achieve blamelessness, either by following the rules or by denying ethics altogether. Both approaches inevitably cause needless harm to oneself and others.

The complete stance is stabilized by understanding that ethical freedom can be a source of benevolent joy, not mean-spirited selfishness. It is stabilized by understanding that ethical responsiveness eliminates anxiety, and is not an intolerable burden of infinite responsibility without control.

Pattern

On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Seeing pattern

Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a person or a bug. Our brains and senses evolved largely to find the patterns that make survival and reproduction possible.

Patterns are everywhere in our experience. The material world is full of patterns: shapes, processes, connections, similarities and differences. Society, culture, thought, and concepts are also patterned.

Since this book is about meaningness, patterns of meaning are particularly relevant.

Being mistaken about pattern

Submarine. Or maybe a shark with a big hat. Or something.
(Wikipedia illustration of pareidolia.)

Psychological research shows that people frequently perceive patterns that are not actually there. The brain automatically interprets even completely random events as meaningful. This tendency is called “patternicity” or “apophenia”.

Extreme apophenia is a symptom of psychosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and much of religious experience. But mild examples are universal. It is impossible not to see faces where there are none.

It is also possible, and common, to miss patterns that do exist. (Science, for instance, could be described as a search for non-obvious patterns.)

The brain, however, seems to be wired to give patterns the benefit of the doubt. It would rather make the mistake of seeing non-existent patterns than of rejecting real ones. (Maybe this is because, during evolution, missing real, dangerous patterns was worse than overreacting to imaginary ones.)

Patternicity, eternalism, and nihilism

The natural tendency to see meaningful patterns, even where there are none, makes humans vulnerable to eternalism. Eternalism is the stance that everything is meaningful. It is a cognitive form of apophenia (patternicity).

Eternalism is the core stance of most religions. Mistaken perceptions of meanings are a key to the psychology of religion. (A crude but amusing and particularly clear example is the veneration of supposed religious imagery miraculously arising in random shapes, such as the famous grilled cheese sandwich whose splotches looked like the Virgin Mary’s face.)

The brain’s unwillingness to overlook possible patterns is part of what makes nihilism less common than eternalism. Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Although nearly everyone sometimes adopts nihilism momentarily, it is difficult to maintain for long. Meaningful patterns are too obvious.

Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating

A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness. A stance is a tool for understanding, from which you may act. This pages defines a series of terms that describe ways you can take up such a tool.

To adopt a stance is to use it, at a particular moment, as a way of addressing a problem of meaningness.

For example, to adopt the stance of materialism means to think about purpose in terms of “mundane” or personal benefit.

As I explained earlier, stances are unstable. Frequently one adopts a stance only for a few seconds or minutes, before abandoning it for another one.

Mostly, people are not aware of the stances they adopt.

To commit to a stance means to decide to adopt it consistently in the future. For example, you might resolve always to adopt mission as an approach to purpose, rather than materialism.

The various stances that concern a particular dimension of meaningness contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. Committing to one implies rejecting the others. For example, committing to thinking of yourself as ordinary implies rejecting the stances of specialness and nobility.

Commitment via systems

Although people actually think about meaningness in terms of stances, mostly they think they think about meaningness in terms of “systems.” Systems include religions, philosophies, ideologies, spiritual and psychological frameworks, and so forth.

Because people are mostly not aware of stances, it is somewhat unusual to commit to a stance directly. Instead, people commit to systems, which in turn demand certain stances.

An obvious example: most Western religions require the stance of eternalism. To be a good Christian, you are supposed to adopt eternalism whenever questions of meaningness arise.

Two more examples: some psychological ideologies require the stance of true self; some political ideologies require the stance of romantic rebellion.

To accomplish a stance means that you actually do consistently adopt it, every time its dimension of meaningness becomes an issue. For example, accomplishing nihilism would mean that you always regard everything as meaningless.

Accomplishing a stance is difficult. Obvious, everyday evidence constantly contradicts all the confused stances. The complete stances are subtle and emotionally unsatisfactory.

In most cases, I think accomplishment is impossible in practice. Human beings are not actually put together in a way that makes it possible to see everything as meaningless. (Or as meaningful, as would be required to accomplish eternalism.)

If you have committed to a stance, and have not accomplished it, you must apply effort to adopt it in cases in which it doesn’t seem to fit; and you often fail. I call this wavering.

Wavering causes emotional and cognitive problems. I explain what these problems are, for each specific stance, in the main part of this book.

These problems can be overcome. For confused stances, I show how to recognize them, and how to use them as a spur to adopting the corresponding complete stance instead. For complete stances, I show how to resolve the difficulties.

Each confused stance, although mistaken and usually damaging when adopted, is based on a valuable insight. (Otherwise, it would not be attractive at all.)

For example, monism, the idea that “all is One,” is based on the accurate insight that we are not isolated individuals, that there is no hard boundary between self and other, and that things are connected in innumerable ways, many of which we cannot know.

When one adopts a complete stance, the intelligent aspects of confused stances can be appropriated as tools. A complete stance is “complete” in that it incorporates the intelligent parts of the opposed confused stances for that dimension of meaningness. From the standpoint of the complete stance, the confused stances (which everyone understands) can be used to communicate the complete insight, and to draw others to it.

For example, although it is not true that “all is One,” the language of monism may be useful in explaining that things are non-separate—which is true.

Schematic overview: all dimensions

This page is a schematic overview of the main part of this book. It briefly describes the various stances one can take to each of the dimensions of meaningness.

Meaning and meaninglessness

Unity, diversity, and separateness

Purpose

Self

Personal value

Capability

Ethics

Social authority

Sacredness

Contingency

Meaning and meaninglessness

The puzzle of meaningness

Two years ago, well into a mainly happy marriage, you began a secret affair.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

Your lover—also married—understood parts of you that your spouse did not. You were able to be a different person. You explored aspects of your personality that you had never been able to express before. You made different sorts of jokes. You went on adventurous dates, trying things your spouse—who you knew was sweet but a bit dull when you got married—would never have agreed to do.

After a year and a bit, the passion waned. Your secret meetings began to feel slightly repetitive. You found that your personalities would not be compatible in the long term. You wanted quite different things out of life.

It began to seem you were going through the motions. You had one meaningless fight about nothing. Then you discussed the future, and agreed to end the affair on good terms.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean?

Where did the meaning go?

In the beginning, the affair seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you wrong to think it was meaningful at the start? Was it always meaningless? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

Perhaps the original meaning lives on in memory, and in the changes in you? You know that the effects of the affair will reverberate for years to come. But what meaning will it have in ten, twenty, thirty years, when life has moved on to other dramas? What could it mean after everyone involved is dead?

How could meaningfulness come and go? To be more than just an opinion, or a feeling, shouldn’t meanings stay the same eternally?

The ethical dimension

“Eternal” reminds you uncomfortably that, of course, there is an ethical dimension to adultery. From the beginning, and all through the affair, you could not ignore that.

You grew up Christian, and you know that any pastor would say that adultery is always wrong. But you left the Church in your teens, when you decided you had to say what was right and wrong in the Bible, not the other way around.

You also have friends who say a married affair is definitely OK—so long as some conditions are met.

But you yourself find it hard to decide whether this one was right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between.

It was mostly a remarkable and enjoyable experience (with some slightly yuck moments toward the end). If it were not for the ethical concerns, you certainly wouldn’t regret it.

More importantly, you think, its lasting consequences were mainly good. Your lover was quite different in bed from anyone you had been with, and you learned to be more open when making love yourself. That has improved sex in your marriage; your spouse is happy about that.

On the other hand, if you had been caught, it would have hurt several people besides you. Putting innocents at risk must be part of the moral equation.

And there is another lasting effect. You aren’t sure if it is good or bad. Your affair confirmed that something important is missing in your marriage—something you will never get from your spouse. Before, you suspected; now you know. Now, you cannot un-know that.

That is bad for the marriage; but maybe it is good for you. Maybe even for your spouse, in the long run.

You cannot help wondering about other possibilities. Is it realistic to want lasting passion and compatibility?

You do not want to become a serial adulterer in an attempt to find out.

Ethics: what are they good for?

You are introduced to a rather odd woman at a cocktail party. She is deathly pale, with a black leather miniskirt and extensive, spiky tattoos. She sounds normal enough, though, and explains that she teaches philosophy at a local university.

“Oh? That’s interesting,” you say. “What kind of philosophy?”

“Well, um, ethics, actually.”

“Ah,” you say. “Um—I wonder if I could ask you a professional question?”

“Well, if you want personal advice—” she begins, frowning.

“No, sorry! Not like that. You see, I got really interested in ethics recently. I kind of geeked out on it, actually. I read a bunch on the web, and then a couple books. So I learned all about virtue ethics and deontology and consequentialism and stuff. But what I don’t understand is how you would use all that to figure out what to do in a real-life ethical quandary. It seems awfully abstract.”

“Oh dear,” she says, grinning. “You have discovered our dirty little secret.”

“What?”

“Well, you know, most ethicists have the same problem. Our professional work usually isn’t much help when ethical push comes to practical shove.”

“Oh,” you say.

“How does that make you feel?”

You call your friend Susie. After some small talk, you come around to the point. “Susie—I’m not sure how to ask this, but—you remember you told me once about a therapist who was helpful to you?”

She laughs. “Yes, of course. After my first was born—”

“Sam,” you remember.

“Right, Sam. Can you believe he’s in second grade now? Anyway, I had post-partum depression, and Janet was really helpful. Are you OK? Do you want me to give you her number?”

“Yeah, I’m OK, I think. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me—”

“You don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist, you know!”

“Yeah, I know. But what I remember is your saying that everything seemed meaningless. And—”

“I had all these expectations about what being a mother would be like. And the reality wasn’t anything like that. She helped me figure out how I felt about that.”

“Right, so I’m kind of wondering what something in my life means, I mean meant, so I thought—”

“Sure, of course. Hang on and I’ll look her up. If I can just figure out how this damn phone works…”

Talking with the therapist doesn’t go as smoothly.

“How does that make you feel?” is her mantra. After answering that dozens of times, over several sessions, you finally rebel. “I know how it makes me feel. What I want to know is what it means.”

“Well, what does it mean to you?” she asks.

“But that’s just it,” you say. “I want to know what it actually means. Not just to me. I mean, meaning isn’t just a feeling. Ethics can’t be like that. Some things are just right or wrong, no matter what you feel about them.”

“That seems like quite a polarizing view,” the therapist says. “Maybe things aren’t so black and white… I see our hour is almost up. Next time, perhaps it would be helpful for you to tell me about your parent’s marriage.”

You decide there won’t be a next time.

Meaningness is not mostly ethics

Ethics, you realize, couldn’t answer the question “what did that mean?” anyway. Even if you could be sure whether the affair was right or wrong, the one word “right” or “wrong” would hardly begin to express the meaning of the relationship. Even an explanation of why it was right or wrong would still ignore most of what seemed to matter about it.

The meaning of the affair seems to have many dimensions besides ethics. Yet you find it hard to say what those would be.

Certainly, how you feel about it is another dimension. And how your former lover feels too.

But what it says about you seems more important. You didn’t think you were the sort of person who would cheat—and you still don’t. But apparently you are—because you did.

What else does that imply about you? Are you less trust-worthy than you thought, in other ways?

You felt, in the initial rush, that you had no choice. You tried as hard as you could, you thought, to resist your feelings, and failed. Could you have done differently? Is it just sleazy self-justification to say that you would have had to have been a different person to have chosen differently—and that it is not possible to be anyone other than you are?

But now, in fact, you are not the same person you were. The affair changed you; and that is another dimension of its meaning. Your risk-loving lover gave you a confidence you did not have before. And the affair exposed parts of yourself you were only vaguely aware of. Now those often come into play as you think and feel and relate.

Beyond all that, you suspect there are dimensions of meaning that transcend the personal; that go beyond the effects on anyone involved.

Marriage is a sacrament, according to the Church. It is a contract with God as well as another person. You don’t exactly believe in God any more… but marriage doesn’t seem to just be an agreement between two people, either. Maybe it is society, not God, to whom you are responsible? Marriage is a foundation of society. But whose business is it what you do, if it has no consequences for them?

Besides which, the affair itself seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Sometimes, making love, the sense that you were separate people dropped away. There was simply intense sensation and exquisite action—with no one there to feel or act. And then sometimes it seemed that it was the entire universe making love. Awareness extended into infinity, and there was the presence of the God you don’t believe in.

But surely that was an illusion. This is just self-justification, isn’t it? It makes no sense at all to talk of self-indulgent pleasure as sacred.

A life lesson

During the affair, you told no one. It was a private thing, just for you and your lover. But now, needing perspective, you confide in two close friends.

Over lunch, you tell Chris the short version. You want to be clear that you are not looking for sympathy or support or advice. You need help figuring out what it meant.

“It’s a life lesson,” says Chris. “The universe always sends you the exact experiences you need to develop your true self. It’s the way you find out what you were really meant to do.”

“But what’s the lesson, then?” you ask. “What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s up to you,” says Chris. “You are totally responsible for your own reality, you know. But you have to use your intuition. I think you think too much, sometimes. I mean, really, reading philosophy books is not going to help you find the meaning of an affair! If you go deeply into your feelings, you will find the answer. Maybe that’s the lesson, in itself!”

Lunch ends a little awkwardly. Chris has fit your experience to a generic spiritual story. Nothing in it takes account of any of the details, of the complex texture of your relationships and your life. What you want to know about is the meaning of your affair, not about meaning in general. You are a bit annoyed that Chris doesn’t understand, or is ignoring what you care about; and you can’t completely hide it. Chris always was a bit of an airhead, you think. In retrospect, not the right person to consult.

You are aware that Chris, in turn, is a bit annoyed, because you are dismissing valuable spiritual insight. You seem excessively skeptical, materialistic, and self-involved.

There is an unspoken agreement: “we won’t talk about this again—and we’ll avoid other topics that would expose our different takes on life.”

Life is for living

You meet Kim for drinks after work. Kim is sensible, and you know won’t get mystical on you.

At first, the discussion seems to go well. Unlike Chris, Kim wants to know about the details. Exactly what was so great about the sex? Where did you go on dates? How did you keep the secret?

After an hour, you start again to be a bit frustrated. What you want to know is what it meant. The details matter—but not every detail matters. It would take a year to tell the total story of a year-long affair; and then what? The story itself is not what matters; it is what it means.

“Why does it have to ‘mean’ something?” asks Kim. “Why can’t you just let it be what it was?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” you say. “What was it?”

“It’s just life,” says Kim. “Life is for living, I guess.”

“What does that mean?” you ask. “That’s what I want to know—how should I live life?”

“You mean, like, is it wrong to have an affair?” asks Kim.

“Well, that’s part of it,” you say.

“Geez, I don’t know,” says Kim. “I guess you only get one life, and the point is to enjoy it. So you have to look out for yourself, and get what you want, some of the time. And, of course, you have to have some kind of ethics. But no harm, no fault. Anyway, it’s over now—why worry about it?”

You nod agreement, but silently you think: That seems too easy.

“So when you did it in the stairwell at Chez Jean’s, were you, like, standing against the wall, or lying down on the landing, or what?” asks Kim.

What kind of world is this?

Neither of your friends’ views was helpful. Chris has a big-picture theory of meaning, which probably came out of some self-help book, but it doesn’t seem to explain anything about your affair. Kim isn’t interested in any meaning beyond the mundane and obvious.

Neither view seems exactly wrong, but both seem to miss what is important. You wonder if somehow they could be combined. Is there a way to understand meaning that take account of both the big picture and the details?

To be useful, a big picture story has to help make sense of specifics. But, it occurs to you, the meaning of the specifics says a lot about what the big picture has to be.

The world is a very different place depending on whether your affair was definitely wrong (or right), or if that is just a personal opinion—or a cultural agreement.

The world is a very different place depending on whether “the universe” sends you ideal life lessons, or “the universe” is some rocks and gas scattered through vast empty space.

The world is a very different place depending on whether you could have chosen not to begin the affair, or if (being who you are) you could not have acted differently.

The world is a very different place depending on whether somehow the meaning of the affair could become perfectly clear—or if it was inherently nebulous.

Hot topic

This page is about the nebulosity of meaningness. In the story, the meaning of the secret affair seems “nebulous”: ambiguous, uncertain, changing as it unfolds and then recedes into the past.

The page is not about adultery. It just uses that as an example, of nebulosity.

You may have a definite opinion about whether or when adultery can ever be ethical. Nevertheless, you also know that other people have different opinions.

And, I hope you agree that “right” or “wrong” cannot capture all the meaning of a relationship. It has many dimensions that remain nebulous even if the ethics seem unambiguous.

I wrote about an married affair because it is something everyone understands. It is familiar from gossip and fiction, if not personal experience. The puzzle of what did that mean? is instantly recognizable.

The topic is not ideal, though, because it is emotionally hot, and the ethical issue may crowd out other points.

There is a danger here of misunderstanding me as offering an ethical opinion. Because the page does not take a clear position, you might misunderstand me as suggesting that the affair should not be judged as either right or wrong. I am not.

This page is not about ethics, either. It’s about the puzzling quality of not knowing, and not knowing how anyone could know. My opinion about the ethics of the affair is irrelevant. What matters is that its overall meaning could be unclear, at least to some people.

You might wonder whether the story is autobiographical, or based on some particular affair I heard about. It isn’t. I myself have never been married, and have never had a secret affair outside my main relationship. However, I have certainly had relationships whose meaning I didn’t understand (and still don’t). And I have faced other difficult issues in sexual ethics.

Meaningfulness and meaninglessness

Some things are meaningful; some are meaningless. Some are vaguely in-between.

This is our constant, natural experience in everyday life. It is only in religion, spirituality, and philosophy that people insist that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is.

Insisting that everything is meaningful is eternalism. Insisting that nothing is meaningful is nihilism.

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Understanding what is wrong with them, and how the complete stance avoids their confusion, is key to the rest of this book.

Everyday examples

Some experiences are pretty much meaningless. This is true even when they have a positive or negative effect on you.

Your usual bus left two minutes late; the Coke machine mistakenly gave you an extra coin in change; you spilled some of it on your shirt.

So what? Such things just happen. They don’t happen for any particular reason; they’re effectively random. They don’t have any implications beyond their immediate, small effect on you. They don’t tell you anything about yourself or about the universe, beyond the obvious.

You go for a hike alone in the desert, and your arm gets trapped between two rocks. You cannot free it, and after waiting several days for an improbable rescue, you realize you have the choice of cutting off your own arm with a dull knife, or dying of thirst.

Although an accident, this is a meaningful choice. If you survive, you will remember it as a meaningful experience. Though it was an entirely personal adventure, with no direct effect on anyone else, millions of other people are likely to find it meaningful as well.

We speak of “major life events”—marriage; giving birth; death of parent, child, or spouse; life-threatening illness; financial triumph or catastrophe. These are experiences most people would agree were highly meaningful.

So what?

Some things are more meaningful than others, evidently. You might say that meaningfulness and meaninglessness are a matter of degree, not either/or.

That’s not quite right, either, though. In many cases, it is difficult to say how meaningful an event was. This might not be a problem with knowing how meaningful it was, but an inherent nebulosity of the situation itself.

None of this is mysterious, or should be controversial. In fact, in ordinary circumstances, probably everyone would agree.

Still, there are situations that make it tempting to say that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is. These situations give rise to eternalism and nihilism. The rest of this chapter explains why these temptations arise, why we should resist them, and how.

Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism

Why would anyone want to claim that everything is meaningful, or that everything is meaningless, defying our everyday experience that some things are meaningful and some not?

Here I’ll give an example of extreme meaninglessness, and one of extreme meaningfulness. Because it is difficult to deny their meaninglessness and meaningfulness, these help uncover the reasons people might want to do that.

Fear of meaninglessness motivates eternalism

A tiny gray pebble slides half an inch down a slope on a lifeless planet a million light-years from the nearest star. No being ever knows about this, and nothing happens as a result of it.

If anything is meaningless, this is it. So why on earth would you claim this must be meaningful? Only if it is important that absolutely everything is meaningful. And why would that be?

This insistence is motivated by fear: the fear that perhaps everything is meaningless.

If we could definitely say which things are meaningful and which are meaningless, there would be no problem. The meaninglessness of the pebble’s slide would not threaten the meaningfulness of our own lives.

But we cannot always say what has meaning and what does not. We have no hard-line test. Meaningfulness is frustratingly unreliable; transient, uncertain.

There are clues. In everyday experience, it seems that things are meaningful only if they are meaningful to someone. And, mostly things are meaningful only if they have some effect, positive or negative, on someone. The pebble’s slide is meaningless because it fails those tests.

But what about your own life? Things happen that seem meaningful to you. But often they do not seem meaningful to other people—especially if they affect only you. And it is certainly possible to be mistaken about meaningfulness—to suppose things have meanings that they don’t. So isn’t it possible that you are entirely mistaken about meaningfulness? Isn’t it possible that life itself is completely meaningless? That is a profoundly depressing idea.

“Nonsense,” you think. “I know that my life is meaningful to me.” But what good is that? No one else cares about your life the way you do. Maybe your supposed “meaningfulness” is a delusion. Maybe it is purely subjective, and exists only in your own mind. And then, so what? That seems like a meaningless kind of “meaning.”

This is a slippery slope you don’t want to slide down. Since there seem to be no definite criteria for meaningfulness, you cannot rely on anything to have meaning. There is no solid ground under foot, once you admit the nebulosity of meaningness.

Better to stick a stake in the ground at the top of the hill. If everything is meaningful, then there is no need to sort out what is or isn’t. There is no need to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is a reliable foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

This is the stance of eternalism. Eternalism provides a reassuring firmness, certainty, definiteness to meaning. It says: you are right to care about what you do, because it is truly meaningful.

But what makes everything meaningful? What could give meaning to the pebble?

Here, you must invoke a Cosmic Plan. There has to be a universe-spanning intelligence that knows everything, and that gives everything meaning. (What meaning? That is not always for humans to know.)

The supposed meaningfulness of the pebble and the Cosmic Plan are mutually reinforcing. The pebble couldn’t be meaningful without the Cosmic Plan. If seemingly meaningless things were not really meaningful, the Cosmic Plan would have no work to do, and we would have no reason to imagine it.

Since usually things are meaningful only to someone, who likes or dislikes them, you might personalize the Cosmic Plan. God is the “someone” to whom all things are meaningful, and whose preferences gives positive or negative value to all things.

Fear of excessive meaning motivates nihilism

A gigantic spaceship arrives. Astonishingly beautiful aliens emerge, and announce that they are on a diplomatic mission from the Universal Federation of a billion planets.

Humankind, they explain, has reached the point of sophistication where we can join the Federation. We will not, however, join as junior partners. Human beings have a unique spiritual ability not found anywhere else in the universe. This ability is latent in us now, but can easily be developed with tools the aliens will provide.

Unfortunately, the entire universe, with its billions of inhabited planets, will be destroyed just a few years from now. A tiny flaw in the fabric of reality is about to spread across the universe in an instant, like a pin-prick in a balloon, and the whole of space-time will evaporate.

Only the specially-developed spiritual abilities of human beings can prevent this.

The aliens will make us immortal and vastly more intelligent than any human has ever been—a necessary prerequisite to this spiritual development. Naturally, this will make us radically different from the way we were; we will no longer be human.

Having saved the universe, humanity will lead all other intelligent species to a triumphant destiny, a culmination of the ultimate purpose of existence that is now utterly inconceivable.

However, since the aliens do not wish to force anyone to do anything, it is up to us to decide whether to undergo the transformation.

This is a meaningful choice. The fate of the universe, and billions of billions of beings, hangs in the balance.

Suddenly, your nagging back ache, your promotion review at work, and the credit card company’s screw-up that is causing all kinds of havoc—all highly meaningful yesterday—seem totally meaningless. Political parties, religious differences, wars, economics, favorite songs—even these become meaningless by comparison.

The only way to say “this choice would not really be meaningful” is to insist that, no matter how many beings are affected, the apparent meaning is still just subjective. It’s only in the minds of a bunch of random life-forms, who are (after all) just blobs of matter; swirls of subatomic particles. Therefore, it is illusory.

Implicit here again is the view that real meaningfulness could only be objective, and could only be provided by something external to the universe. There is no Cosmic Plan, so nothing is truly meaningful.

This is the stance of nihilism. Nihilism’s improbable insistence on meaninglessness is also motivated by fear. It is the mirror-image fear of eternalism.

The fear is that, if you admit anything is meaningful, then perhaps everything has a fixed meaning—or at least everything in your life.

You don’t want the responsibility of dealing with the intricacies, implications, and imperatives of all that meaningfulness. And if everything had a specific meaning, there would be no room for creativity. You would have no freedom.

Perhaps worst of all, you might have to accept a lot of sentimental claptrap—the nonsense eternalists spout in a desperate attempt to justify their delusions.

Meaningness without a Cosmic Plan

Eternalism and nihilism exist only out of fear of each other. There is a better alternative—what I call the complete stance.

I suggest that meaningfulness is not provided by a Cosmic Plan. There is no Cosmic Plan; but that does not mean that nothing is meaningful.

I suggest that some things are meaningful, and some things are not. That is true even though we have no definite criteria to decide which is which.

I suggest that meaningness is neither objective, nor subjective.

Accepting these suggestions allows you to let go of the unrealistic fears that motivate both eternalism and nihilism.

This complete view of meaningness has its own implications. They may seem to make life more complicated. However, the complete stance also eliminates the many troubles eternalism and nihilism cause.

Nihilism

This page is a “stub”: a placeholder, so I can link to it, while I have not yet finished writing it. The text that follows, if any, is an explanation of what the page will say, rather than the proper contents of the page itself.

For an introduction to this topic, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.”

Spam from God

Nihilism begins with the intelligent recognition that you have been conned by eternalism.

Confidence tricks have a common structure. The victim is offered something that is too good to be true: great value in exchange for something much smaller. Critically, the victim’s side of the deal is to do something that is itself unethical. That explains why the offer is so good: not everyone, reasons the victim, would do this deal, so the guy offering it to me has to make it sweet. Once the victim realizes he has been scammed, the illegality of his own action prevents him from going to the authorities.

The most common current confidence trick is the Nigerian “419” spam scam. You get an email that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF A DEPOSED NIGERIAN DICTATOR. DURING THE COUP, I MANAGED TO SNAG $30 MILLION AND STUCK IT IN A SECRET NIGERIAN ACCOUNT. NOW I WANT TO GET THE MONEY OUT OF THE COUNTRY BEFORE SOMEONE NOTICES. PLEASE, I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL USE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT TO TRANSFER THE FUNDS. YOUR FEE FOR HELPING WILL BE $10 MILLION.

P.S. THIS MIGHT NOT BE EXACTLY LEGAL, SO PLEASE DON’T TELL THE AUTHORITIES. YOUR DISCRETION IS CRITICAL TO SUCCESS.

Kitschy eternalism metaphorically sends you spam that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF GOD. I LIVE IN A CUTE ’N’ CUDDLY PASTEL HEAVEN WITH MY FAVORITE SHEEP. I WANT TO GET YOU INTO HEAVEN TOO, BUT I NEED YOUR HELP. UNFORTUNATELY THERE’S LEGALISTIC HITCHES ABOUT SIN AND SUBMISSION TO GOD’S LAW AND STUFF. THEY WOULD SEND PRACTICALLY EVERYONE TO HELL, BUT I’VE FOUND A LOOPHOLE THAT CAN GET YOU INTO HEAVEN ANYWAY. I JUST NEED YOU TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN AND PRETEND A BIT AND WE CAN WORK IT OUT.

P.S. DON’T TELL DAD, HE MIGHT GET OLD TESTAMENT ABOUT IT.

This scam is too good to be true—but also too good not to go for. We are all sometimes willing to do violence to our own intelligence in hope of salvation. And so we all get conned, over and over, by eternalism.

Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics

The Who—Won’t Get Fooled Again

Wavering nihilism is the defiant determination not to get fooled again. Having been swindled over and over by eternalism, the nihilist stance refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious manifestations of meaningfulness—lest they, too, turn out to be illusory.

Betrayal and loss

Eternalism makes seductive promises: that you are always loved, that the universe is in good order, that right and wrong can be known for certain, that your suffering has meaning, that you have a special role in creation, that there will be cosmic justice after death.

When you have been disappointed often enough, you start to realize these sweet lies are poison. Such grand promises cannot be kept. Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow.

On the last page, I compared eternalism with the Nigerian “419” fraud. Many retired people have lost their entire life savings to this spam-based scam. They face the same set of emotional reactions we have to any other catastrophic loss, such as a divorce following infidelity: denial, anger, arguing, depression, and acceptance.1

On this page, I’ll explain briefly the dynamics of these reactions to loss of faith in eternalism. Then I’ll devote a full page to each strategy separately.

Denial

One’s first reaction to recognizing the nebulosity of meaningness is to deny it. On some level, you realize that not everything has a definite meaning; that eternalism is false. But since that seems too awful to contemplate, you refuse to admit it. You redouble your insistance that everything is peachy keen—and prepare to do violence to anyone and anything that contradicts you.

This is wavering eternalism: the strategies of kitsch and arming. These are not nihilistic strategies; but they can easily flip into nihilism, when nebulosity becomes so obvious that pretending becomes impossible.

Anger

Nihilism is a simple inversion of eternalism. It denies that there anything is meaningful at all. At times when meaning is particularly evanescent, when you are particularly bitterly disappointed in it, you may commit to nihilism. “I’ll never get fooled again!”

But this commitment is difficult—probably impossible. Meaningfulness is, at other times, obvious. As a result, in practice all nihilism is wavering nihilism.

Whereas wavering eternalism consists of eternalism plus secret doubt, wavering nihilism consists of nihilism plus secret passion. Passion is the recognition of meaningfulness. To maintain wavering nihilism, you must blind yourselves to meaningfulness, which is even more difficult than blinding yourselves to the nebulosity of meaning.

Rage is one way wavering nihilism reacts to evidence of meaningfulness. This is a defiant negativity: “I don’t care! No matter what you say, I will not admit life is meaningful!” Nihilistic rage wants to destroy whatever has meaning, and whoever points to meaning. (This is the mirror-image strategy to armed eternalism.)

I mentioned that the people most prone to nihilism are sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives. These are the people best able to deploy the corresponding approaches of rage, argument, and depression. Almost everyone adopts all these strategies at times, however.

Arguing with reality

Eternalism uses willful stupidity to not-see nebulosity. Realizing that you have been duped, and seeing through eternalism’s lies, is intelligent. Mostly, only unusually smart people explicitly commit to nihilism.2

Smart people are used to using clever arguments to get what they want. So it is natural to apply intellectual brilliance to the difficult task of maintaining wavering nihilism, to fight its obstacle, obviousness of meaningfulness. Nihilistic intellectualization is the counterpart to eternalist kitsch: calm insistence on plainly false claims.

Somehow meaningfulness must be explained away by conceptual sleight-of-hand. A theory that proves “nothing is really meaningful”—in which “really” is the gate to a hell writhing with logical demons—can distract you from the obvious.

This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or seem so insightful as to dazzle you into submission. Typically, nihilistic intellectualization involves extreme abstraction, voluminous intricacy, sesquipedalian diction, non-standard logic, and often reflexivity (meta-level analysis). These insulate the argument from checking against everyday experience.3

Because nihilistic intellectualization is often colored by its sister-strategies of anger or depression, it is often aggressive, hostile, cynical, or pessimistic; whereas eternalistic justifications are typically cloying, simpering, naïve, and Pollyanna-ish.

Depression

Realizing that eternalism will always fail often results in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, and exhaustion.

The loss of guaranteed meaningfulness is a real one, and it is natural to feel sad about it. Depression goes beyond spontaneous sadness, however. It is active and deliberate—although it feels passive and externally imposed.

Nihilistic depression suppresses the feelings (positive and negative) that go with recognition of meaning. Depression can be thought of as rage turned inward. It tries to kill your passionate response to reality.

Depression copes with loss by lowering the stakes. It wants to disengage from problems of meaning by refusing to admit that they are important. If nothing is really meaningful, then the loss of meaning does not matter. Of course, you do care about life. But that is unacceptable when you have committed to nihilism. That caring is the only obstacle to accomplishing nihilism, and depression tries to annihilate it.

Acceptance

Acceptance of both meaninglessness and meaningfulness is the way out of nihilism, and into the complete stance.

One has to fully allow the emotional loss that comes with the collapse of eternalism. The pain of loss is real and cannot be destroyed, talked away, or minimized (as the nihilistic coping strategies attempt to do). You have to admit that you do care, that the world is meaningful, so the stakes are high. But you also have to learn to turn away from eternalism’s alluring promise to remove the pain by restoring fixed meanings.

Conceptual understanding of nebulosity is probably required. Until you understand how meaningfulness and meaninglessness coexist, confused stances alternate, jostling for position as meaning and lack of meaning become more and less obvious. The complete stance remains invisible until you learn the sideways move to nebulosity. Nebulosity allows the coexistence of pain and joy, and reveals the benefits of meaninglessness.

Appropriation

Nihilism’s analysis of the defects of eternalism is largely right. That analysis can be appropriated in the complete stance.

Nihilistic rage can be transformed into clear-minded rejection of fixation; nihilistic intellectualization into non-conceptual appreciation of nebulosity; nihilistic depression into enjoyment of meaninglessness with equanimity.

• 1. This list was formulated by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying) in terms of one’s reactions to one’s own impending death. Not everyone necessarily has all the same reactions; but it’s a useful framework for the discussion here.
• 2. This is a generalization, of course. It is possible to make brilliant conceptual arguments in favor of eternalism (usually in defense of a system, such as an eternalist religion or political ideology). There are probably also stupid people who commit to nihilism (although I have not come across one).
• 3. Nihilistic intellectualization is characteristic of postmodernist thought. I will have much more to say about postmodernism later in the book.

Unity and diversity

The Big Three stance combinations

Complex ideologies are based on collections of simple stances: fundamental attitudes toward meaningness. Some stances (addressing different dimensions of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations.

These combinations are:

• Dualist eternalism: everything is given a definite meaning by something separate from you. Christianity and Islam are based on this combination; God is what gives everything meaning.
• Monist eternalism: you, God, and the universe are a single thing, which is definitely meaningful. Advaita Hinduism is monist and eternalist, as is much current pop spirituality.
• Dualist nihilism: we are isolated individuals, wandering in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism, and scientism tend to dualist nihilism.

(Sabio Lantz has made up a helpful diagram illustrating these.)

Each of the three primary combinations typically comes with a corresponding collection of secondary stances; I’ll get to that in a minute.

The apparent lack of alternatives

Regarding the fundamental questions of meaning—does it exist, and where does it come from?—these three are the only well-known possibilities. I think all three are wrong; this book advocates a fourth combination of stances (about which I’ll say something at the end of this page).

Each of the Big Three has serious, obvious defects. However, people often commit to one of them primarily because it looks less bad than the other two.

Understanding this, you can see that much of the rhetoric supporting systems boils down to “less bad”:

• “God must exist, because otherwise there is no purpose in living, and you have no way of telling right from wrong.”
• “You have to admit that everything is meaningless, because we know God is a fairy tale.”
• “A God who is someone somewhere else cannot end your alienation from other beings. Enlightenment is possible only here, now. Only by being God can you overcome the isolation and limitations of material embodiment.”

No monist nihilism

Considering the two primary axes eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism, there is a fourth possibility: monist nihilism. That is the view that “all is One, and it is meaningless.” Although this is conceptually coherent, it has few (if any) advocates. Apparently it is not emotionally attractive in the way the other combinations are.1

So, in practice, monism always implies eternalism, and nihilism always implies dualism. In the rest of this book, I’ll often speak simply of “monism” or “nihilism,” and you can take the eternalism and dualism for granted.

Other stances in the Big Three combinations

In addition to the four stances to fundamental questions of meaningness, there are stances to more specific dimensions such as purpose, ethics, and the nature of the self. These are commonly folded in with the Big Three combinations when people build ideological systems.

In some cases, the choices are forced. If you think nothing is meaningful (nihilism) then you have to accept that can be no ethics (ethical nihilism).

More often, the choices of stance toward specific dimensions of meaningness are logically independent. For example, both reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion are logically consistent with eternalism.

However, each of the Big Three has a typical emotional texture, which may be more or less compatible with other stances. Dualist eternalism generally combines with reasonable respectability, not romantic rebellion; that is far more likely to go along with nihilism. Dualist eternalism has meaning coming from some Cosmic Plan, and you had better obey what it says.

Most (if not all) systems are somewhat incoherent, and one system may take opposing stances to different specific cases. The psychological instability of stances reinforces this.

Dualist eternalism: typical combinations

The typical2 emotional texture of dualist eternalism is self-righteousness. You are validated by the eternal ordering principle.

Typically, dualist eternalism combines with:

• Mission: your purpose is to carry out the Cosmic Plan.
• Ethical totalitarianism: the eternal ordering principle says what is right and wrong.
• Reasonable respectability: society is a reflection of the Cosmic Plan, and you should obey authority.
• Religiosity: the eternal ordering principle says what is sacred and what is profane.
• Causality: everything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan. (Except free will lets us do evil.)

Nihilism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of nihilism is defiant negativity. It sucks that the universe is meaningless, but you hate (and want to shout down) eternalists who proclaim the lie of meaningfulness.

Typically, nihilism combines with:

• Materialism: since there is no real purpose to life, you might as well get stuff you want.
• Ethical nihilism: ethics are as meaningless as everything else.
• Romantic rebellion: society is an oppressive, meaningless fiction.
• Secularism: nothing is sacred.
• Chaos: the universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reason.

Monism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of monism is smug stupidity. Convinced you are God, you believe you understand everything effortlessly, so you don’t need to try to figure anything out.

Typically, monism combines with:

• Mission: your purpose is to realize your Godhood, and then help others realize theirs.
• True self: your essential nature is indivisible from God.
• Total responsibility: as God, you create the entire universe.
• Specialness: as God, you are the only valuable thing in existence.
• Causality: everything that occurs is your own doing.

Complete stances align with each other

This book advocates a fourth combination of stances: the ones I describe as complete.

Its typical emotional texture is appreciative curiosity.

Here’s how some complete stances align:

• Meaningness: things may be meaningful, meaningless, or may be ambiguously between. It’s worth investigating meanings, but you can’t always expect answers.
• Participation: there is no one right way of drawing boundaries; things can be connected in many different ways, and can also have no significant connection. Finding unexpected connections and redrawing boundaries is often valuable; so is recognizing irrelevance.
• Intermittently continuing: selfness is valuable and should not be rejected; it can usefully be explored, but it has no essential nature.
• Enjoyable usefulness: purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world.
• Ethical responsiveness: ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.

• 1. You might enjoy working out some consequences of monist nihilism. If you are a philosophy geek, you might also wonder whether there are any historical figures who fit the category.
• 2. These textures are tendencies, not absolutes. Some committed dualist eternalists are free from self-righteousness, for instance.

Purpose

Self

Personal value

Capability

Ethics

Authority

Sacredness

Contingency

Terminology: Complete

I use the word “complete” to describe stances that allow nebulosity.

These stances are “complete” in that they don’t deny the existence of any dimension of meaningness.

The term “complete” is not ideal. An earlier version of this book used “non-dual”; but that word is taken to mean something else.

I chose “complete” partly because it echoes the Tibetan word Dzogchen. Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that most influenced this book. “Dzogchen” means “utterly complete.”

Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern

Nebulosity and pattern are key concepts in this book. They are closely related to the Buddhist notions of emptiness and form. For several reasons, I've chosen not to use “emptiness” and “form,” and invented these new terms instead.

First, “emptiness” in English has a common usage with regard to meaningness: it is the feeling of alienation that comes with rejecting it. Emptiness in this sense is an emotional correlate of nihilism, or the perception of meaninglessness. “Emptiness” in Buddhist philosophy means something different. Worse, what it means is related to the Western use, but in a complex way. Talking about Buddhist emptiness in a non-Buddhist context seems bound to cause confusion.

Second, the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and form is famously contentious. Various Buddhist schools each have their own explanations, and vitriolically attack each others’ interpretations. I don’t want to take sides in these battles. I also don’t want to argue about whether my own understanding or explanation of emptiness and form is correct (according to the standards of some Buddhist school or other).

Third, the philosophy of emptiness and form is also famously obscure. It is so abstract and vague that it is hard to know whether the divergent interpretations are actually discussing the same thing, or if they talk past one another because they discuss different topics. It is hard to know whether any of the writers in the field are talking about anything at all, or whether they are discussing something purely imaginary. It is hard to know how one could know which of the accounts is right, or even what it would mean for them to be right or wrong.1

As a result, it is unclear whether “nebulosity and pattern,” as I use the words here, are the same thing as someone’s version of “emptiness and form,” or not. My concepts are influenced particularly by the Aro gTér explanations of emptiness and form; but I am uncertain whether they are identical.

I think that it is probably possible to give completely clear and precise explanations of “nebulosity” and “pattern.”2 This might be useful to the philosophy of emptiness and form. Even for someone who believes “nebulosity and pattern” are different from emptiness and form, they are sufficiently similar that a clear account of one might clarify the other. It might at minimum serve as a challenge to Buddhist philosophers to formulate a comparably clear account.

But I am not going to do that in this book. This book is meant for a general readership, for whom a lengthy discussion of exactly what “nebulosity” and “pattern” mean would be a distraction. (Never mind a discussion of how they relate to the various Buddhist theories of emptiness—interesting as that might be to some.)

I have a sketch of another book on that subject. If only I could write everything at once…

• 1. As it happens, I do have opinions about these questions. I may present them somewhere, someday; but I’m unsure that it would be useful. In any case, it’s a topic that doesn’t belong on this web site.
• 2. Clear and precise enough for analytic philosophy. Some math would be required—enough to impress analytic philosophers.

Terminology: Non-dual

One vase? Or two faces?

The essence of this book is a method for resolving opposing pairs of confusions about meaningness. I would like to call these resolutions “non-dual.” Unfortunately, that word is taken to mean something else. This has already caused much confusion elsewhere.

This book’s method draws on the Buddhist analysis of eternalism and nihilism. Buddhism often describes the resolution of this opposition as “non-duality.”

A quick Google search shows that, in current English, “non-duality” is almost always used to mean something different. Mostly, “non-dual” refers to monism: the doctrine that All is One, and all distinctions are ultimately illusory.

Monism forms a false opposition with dualism: the doctrine that subjects and objects are definitely, objectively separated. In this book, I argue that monism is wrong, and that the main reason people adopt it is because it appears that dualism is the only alternative.

Using “non-dualism” to mean “monism” actively hides other possibilities.

Potentially there may be many different alternatives to dualism, of which monism is only one. (This book advocates another.) It would be useful if all such alternatives could be described as “non-dualistic.” It is probably too late for that; “non-dual” is well-established as meaning “monist.”

“Non-dual” appears to have entered the English language as a direct translation of the Sanskrit word advaita,1 as used in Hindu philosophy. Hindu advaita is monist; it asserts that all beings are One with the Supreme Cosmic Spirit.

Buddhist “non-duality,” and the stances I advocate in this book, are not monist; they reject both twoness and oneness.2 Individuals cannot be objectively separated, but neither are they identical (with each other, or with some sort of Cosmic Something). These stances are“non-dualist/non-monist.”

There has already been extensive confusion on this point. The Buddhist view has often been misunderstood as monist in the West. Often the Buddhist and Hindu “non-dualities” are mixed up. Using “non-duality” to mean “monism” has probably contributed to this confusion.3

• 1. A- means “not,” as in “atheist”; dva is “two,” cognate with “dual”; -ita is “-ity.” Sometimes the close historical relationship between Indian and European languages is obvious.
• 2. There may or may not be a difference between Buddhist non-duality and the stances I advocate. Buddhist philosophy is sufficiently complex and obscure that it is hard to say for certain.
• 3. I suspect that this confusion is partly deliberate. “Perennialism” is the evangelical strategy of describing all religions as distorted misunderstandings of monism. Advocates of monism often insist that Buddhist non-dual philosophy is actually monist, and essentially the same as Hindu advaita, but gets some details wrong. Buddhists reply that it is not monist, and that these “details” are its central point.