My mid-summer nervous breakdown taught me that physical pain is preferable to mental distress and that being critical of the world doesn’t mean we needs must leave the world.

Anyway, I am disappointed with the blog over the past few months, but I don’t want to quit. So I am going to try a soft re-boot here and get back online.

The things I used to care about, what I really tend to think are important are less interesting than political critiques. I believe I have found my political tribe, though, among the anarchists. Anarchism is a negative political philosophy. It points out what ought not to be very well, but is pretty confused about what ought to be. Part of the problem, I think, is that the anarchist agenda starts from a political frame of reference but, if successful, emerges onto a cultural tabula rasa. Culture is the problem. If you want to change the political system, change the culture.

Back to the positive agenda. As an amateur philosopher, I’m mostly interested in figuring out what makes for a good life.

What is it about human beings that makes us care about fairness? There’s no logical necessity for it. Children develop a sensitivity to fairness at a very young age. They’re rather single-minded about it. How much of our morality is based on this impulse? My dog doesn’t seem to care if he doesn’t have as nice a bed as the dog the next door. He doesn’t think it’s unfair that he’s smaller than some other dog. It’s a pretty strange thing when you think about it. We know life is unfair. It’s rather arbitrary and often brutally unfair (just look at Somalia right now). And it doesn’t matter if you’re coming from the left or the right, from privilege or poverty. The rich man thinks it’s really fucking unfair if you try to take his inheritance away and give it somebody else. The poor man thinks it’s really fucking unfair that the rich man won’t pay him enough to pay for health insurance. But why do we care about this so much? Would human beings be more well adapted if we didn’t? Would we accept our lot in life cheerfully if we weren’t obsessed about fairness?

Back when this thing got started about a year ago I had an ironic agenda: to start an online religion. I take LUCK or Tyche to be the only deity worthy of worship. I still like the idea and am open to anyone interested in playing around with this. It’s a pretty big sandbox with lots of cool toys…

I like my blogroll. In particular I am grateful to Prof. Sartwell for giving me a link a while back. I still read his stuff daily (although his anarchist cred seems to be greatly diminished lately after he revealed his support for American Imperialism). Mr. Oxtrot knows his shit and flings it around very well though he is not as intense as Mr. Crow who seems to be vying for the position of next IOZ. I also think Adam is a brilliant commenter (and his blog is very funny — though don’t open it up at work). JRB is at times brilliant. I envy his recent aphoristic style. I don’t visit Cogitamus much these days, but it’s a good place to go to get the party line from what’s left of the left (ugh) and I like their musical choices a lot. There are others that I lurk on now and then.

Time to blog. As the Buddhists say, I am a householder. Which means the majority of my energy at this stage of my life is supposed to be directed toward the care and feeding of my family. So I often experience a vague feeling of guilt while I am surfing around reading blogs instead of doing something more productive.

(Just saw the cover story in this month’s National Geographic which is very interesting. A massive religious site that makes Stonehenge look rather boring has been excavated. A revolutionary theory emerges that turns human history on its head. A religious impulse first drew our hunter-gatherer ancestors together to collectively worship and create the spectacular temples. Agriculture may have emerged after this in order to support the religious activity. So civilization started because of religion not the other way around.)

Heidegger defines humans (Dasein) as the being that takes a stand on its being. This need to have a point, to explain the wonder, anxiety and strangeness of being human necessitates inspires religion.

What is worth worshipping? Contrary to the false religions of the prophets–those that claim historical authority–there is only one absolutely, verifiable power in the world that ought to be at the center of all religious activity: Tyche, accident, chance, luck, joss…

But in what form would such a religion take? How does one worship the mindless force of chaos that drives evolutionary progress but also rains destruction without warning? Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like the God of Abraham anyway. Is there any difference?

Suppose you are a rigid determinist and believe that the physical laws of the universe are fixed; all events are connected by a causal chain going back at least to the Big Bang. You don’t believe in chance–probability and statistics, of course these are scientific, but chance? No such thing. Or perhaps you are a Calvinist or a Muslim. These guys believe God/Allah determines absolutely every moment of history for His own purpose. It’s all part of His plan. Nothing happens in God’s universe by accident. The determinist takes comfort in the knowledge that everything happens for a reason. Free will is a chimera. Human beings, including all of human behavior, are fixed by either physics or the will of God. What appears to be choice is mere action. Part of the long chain of events leading to the Big Crunch or Judgment Day. Take your pick.

But is this view even remotely compatible with human experience? Even if either of these explanations were true, does it follow that there are no accidents?

What matters to a human being is meaning (intelligibility).

It doesn’t matter whether we have free will or whether the universe is materially determined or made up of collapsed probability waves. What matters is that we are limited bodies with unlimited imaginations. We tend to extend ourselves within an existential space and time and that stretching has lots of unintended consequences. One of which is our ability to imagine counter-factuals.

Working on ideas to honor Tyche, to cultivate a relationship with Tyche… Incorporate randomness into one’s life. Make chance events sacred. Utilize chance to a larger extent in decision making process. Practice unpredictability. Avoid routine. Wrestle with accident. The human side is to take the meaningless and make it meaningful. Take the randomly shaped lump of rock and make it into a mastadon. Manufacture meaning. Create significance. Tyche makes this possible. Without her, our creativity is totally derivative.

Chance is the greatest power in the universe. It is the great uncaused cause. There is no ultimate law or mind that determines that this or that must happen at such and such a time. Reality is created by accident. Even in a perfectly determined universe of material laws, there is no ultimate cause for what is. In the realm of human beings, or any conscious entity that makes an issue of itself, we are subject to uncaused causes. We are limited by them. We deify this power, anthropomorphise it and call it God or the gods or karma or the spirit of the universe. But there is no intention behind the uncaused cause. To be otherwise is to be a thinking thing, and that is one thing it cannot be.

There are caused causes. What does that mean? My typing fingers are not moving randomly. They are moved by intention. The intention itself is the beginning of the matter. There is no uncaused cause behind it. This is the greatest mystery of consciousness: not that we are aware, but that we will and do at once.

This is the true Manichean struggle of the cosmos, that between the uncaused cause and the caused cause. Tyche reigns over all and is worthy of devotion. She is the only God before whom man ought to tremble. But we are the children of Tyche. The uncaused cause has begotten a creature that can create, though she, strangely cannot. From the mindless comes mind. From accident comes intention. From intention comes creation. In creation we have a caused cause.

So, this whole enterprise is so serious. Let’s drop the pretense and discuss something of greater interest. Where does the spiritual meet the material? In the hands of the artist. And is this the key to our dilemma? The creator makes new worlds ex nihilo nihil fit without determination. (We reject determinism). This world-creating activity is broad and beyond the limits of craftsmanship. There is no greater work of art than religion, when it sticks. Only a handful of “prophets” have successfully pulled it off. But even the small version of this process can be rewarding. Is “private religion” possible or is it akin to “private language” and impossible (as Wittgenstein proved). We are existentialists for the day. Existence precedes essence insomuch as our “faith” is free and we direct our “leap” only toward those objects that we can imagine are real in virtue of our own imaginings and not “second hand.” So the creative process is fundamental to the religious exercise.

About twenty five years ago one of us tried axiomatizing this process. It begins with an existentially potent phrase: Life is Art. But the next step is more difficult: Art is Religion. The doing of world-creation (art) as one’s sole source of satisfaction in this world (life) becomes a worshipful (meaning-making) belief system (religion).

Is Life Art? Is this really axiomatic? If human beings are truly free, i.e. at liberty to choose how each will live (the strong existentialist view) and not determined by anything, then the best analogy available for the sum of those free choices is art-making. This kind of art is not the craft of the painter, but more like the struggle of the poet who chooses from among a seemingly endless array of meaningful terms, with all their baggage, and assembles them in a unique way to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. Each choice we make is overladen with baggage and unimaginable possibilities. Our eternal collaborator — tyche – conspires both for and against us as we strain to see the product of our labor emerge as a unified whole — a world unto itself.

And the strain of religious hymnody always echoes in our ears. For we want our meaning to be your meaning. But alas, that is a gulf too great for even the cross of Jesus to span. Our everlasting disease of isolation and separation cannot be healed. We are sending smoke signals to each other. And each of us is, in some way, a solipsist, though few would ever admit it. But the artist is not concerned. He is most amazed at his creation. The cataclysm may come, but in the ruins the artist rejoices! Here are broken down buildings to build up again! Piles of broken glass are portholes to a new sun! Destruction brings joy to the survivors. All will be remade in my own image.