Purpose of life - By Johannon 'Joanna' Davis

Purpose of life

To establish the purpose of life one can identify the denominator which is common to all life and furthering this effort, a common factor essential to all humanity irrespective of gender, status or background.  There are two tiers to the purpose of life, firstly, to continue to exist, secondly, and essential to separate us from animals and botanic life, is the pursuit of knowledge.

The first purpose of life is to continue to exist. Evidence for this is found in the body’s perpetual state of awareness as to its need for maintaining basics such as nutrition, allowing for the most basic of functions to continue. As such even in man's most primitive state, the purpose of life was met. As these functions are carried out in nature also, one could further imply that animals and botanic life have purpose. Only in man however does the need to maintain ones existence raise moral questions. For example, in a life or death situation would my consuming essential food and water to continue my existence in place of a pregnant woman who requires sustenance for two lives as opposed to one, be considered immoral? Instinctive patterns of ‘fight or flight’ may further offer support that the avoidance of death is a purpose of life, supported by the most basic cognitive functions.

The second purpose of life and the end which distinguishes man from nature, is the pursuit of knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is essential for mankind as knowledge is the cornerstone of power and choice, precipitating freedom. It also thereby allows the fulfilling of the first purpose of life in man as knowledge provides strategies for survival. This pursuit is a universal principle and should not be confined to lofty ambitions to reach the corners of the universe or an understanding of the nature of happiness, but is found in daily tasks such as the understanding of ones social values and moral code. Such is its intrinsic link to life that not only is the pursuit of knowledge a purpose of life but a sustainer of it. If man is mind and matter then this is the purpose of life for man, whilst the purpose of all life is simply to continue to be.

If we then reject either tier of the purpose of life in favour of the belief that there is no purpose at all, then this rejection must remain relegated only to the outcome of a philosophical exercise as should this rejection of purpose be held true in reality, then humanity must abandon all attempts at continuing to live.

By Johannon 'Joanna' Davis

Man’s end ever fading - By Liam Bland

Man’s end ever fading

How it must once have felt to be alive

When life was struggle and mankind strived

To gather, to hunt, ergo to feed,

Existing within the boundaries of essential need.

Fashioning spear from flint and cloth from hide

To hunt, to kill, to feed the tribe

To have purpose, biological, knowing no existential doubt

To never ask the question; ‘What is it all about?’

But with diminished threat, and limited room

Man fought not to feed, or protect, but to consume.

And as human societies began to thrive

We lost the imperative to merely survive.

Unaware perhaps that the traps of greed would force

Man into a costly and unseemly divorce

From reason pure, animalistic and free,

Replaced with aspiration; servitude, in perpetuity.

And now, tribally estranged, with the system full

Men live as fattened calves, awaiting the cull,

A food source for a ruptured civilisation

Bereft of purpose, of strife and inclination

Money, harnessed, brought individual success,

Succoured hierarchies and enabled, for some, excess,

Reduced man to consumer, the easier to control;

Capital conceiving the original Prole.

Now flaccid, mankind limps in line,

Footsteps fall in regimented time

To the TV’s pacifying, narcotic call

And man, dumbed-down, accepts his fall.

For, as the last lords of land and power flail

And dwindling fuel resources finally fail

We will all fall, feeble, bereft of fight

And slip, forgettable, into endless night.

By Liam Bland

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it - By Martin Prior

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it

Part II: More sex and love?

In the last issue, in fact Part I of the issues on ‘Purpose of Life’, I argued that the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species. 

There are indeed linguistic issues: one might interpret the purpose of life as meaning the purpose for which there is life.  Surely there must be an intelligent power to bring about the manifestation of life.  My argument is that if something is conceptually possible, then in all likelihood it will happen at least once.  

But we must return to the activities we directly pursue: thus if I am a stag, I will not see my purpose of life as maintaining the quality of the gene pool.  What?  The purpose of life is to save the girls from those other guys.  They manage both to be wimps and maltreat the kids at the same time (mine of course).  And if anyone questions that they must be philosophers or the like, and probably not very good philosophers at that.

In Part I, I argued that within a socialist framework, it is the activities we directly pursue rather than socialism itself, that is the purpose of life.  And under socialism there must be a fair opportunity to pursue these goals.  A stag would say fair’s fair, why not, as long as this represents equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.

Now this might suggest that a stag has a lot in common with an economic liberal, where competition is all.  But let us look at my earlier analyses, not least that for the self-image of a supposed exploiter (RHS):

self-image of ‘maroon’ socialist	self-image of economic liberal

I have shown both diagrams in previous issues, but here I have annotated them.  Note that the outer maroon from last time on the socialist diagram has now been termed ‘customary care’, a term I have come up with in the last week: culture, society and custom all overlap.  It should be said that these diagrams, ‘saying it in maroon’, represent an informal account of stages in a socioeconomic process, and as such should be regarded as a tool for formulating a more rigorous hypothesis.

What we see on the right-hand side is that the wider environment, a resource to be exploited rather than respected, is divorced by the market, via supply and demand, from culture, which is now valued for its feeding the demand curve.  One can say a lot about this, but often a species evolves not so much to improve the gene pool as to make it more sexy. Or better equipped for fighting the other guys.  So perhaps one can say that life is for antlers, but antlers are not necessarily for life.

But coming back to the liberal agenda, the modern market does in fact need infinite expansion - often most profitably exploiting resources to extinction – it sows the seeds of its own destruction and periodically it needs to be bailed out by those exploited.  This purpose of life seems to have more in common with a cancer cell.

Would a stag do this?

By Martin Prior

What is the point? - By Patrick Ainley

What is the point?

A point for anything suggests that whatever process is going on in what we observe or take part in can be understood in terms of its own finality. It implies a development towards an end so that the changes taking place – and everything changes – can be made sense of in terms of where the thing is going.

This is like Aristotle’s idea that all mortal things – men, animals and plants – develop according to their own specific natures and this is their purpose for themselves in a sublunary world that is also following the rules for its own perpetuation.

However, if there is no ultimate purpose for everything save its own eventual dissolution and random dissociation into a void, which is what scientists now think will be the ultimate heat-death of the universe (since there is apparently not enough dark and other matter in existence to prevent its endless expansion), then the finality of anything, including humanity collectively and individually, is to fulfil our nature by becoming what we are in the brief time allotted to us as fully as possible.

This was Nietzsche’s idea for accepting what he thought was an endless recurrence in which the universe (as scientists then believed) would be repeated by a perpetual reordering of random events an infinite number of times. Nietzsche’s Superman was a heroic individual who rejoiced in joining this pointless dance and spurned the untermensch who could not live without myths and religions that all supposed some universal purpose guided by a supreme deity, even if only a watchmaker who had constructed the whole caboodle and wound it up to set it all going in the first place.

Darwinism for Nietzsche, as for Dawkins today, explained the emergence of increasingly complex living beings following the same physical laws that allowed the formation of non-living but regular objects and events from the original chaos of creation through further mechanically and statistically random events. Today scientists are experimenting with the sub-atomic building blocks of matter to model how if not why this all happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.

Nietzsche’s existential individualism – aside from its implied moral and philosophical relativism (since what is true or not is what the Superman can get everyone else to accept, so that ‘might is right’) – was not intended to have a social appeal. To find a humanist doctrine that would have a collective appeal ‘to all mankind’ was the task of the European Enlightenment philosophers who sought to replace irrational religion with rationality as the guiding light of human progress. As distinct from other animals, human beings were uniquely able to reflect on their own situation and to make purposes for themselves, the first of which is surely our own survival. And not survival alone but betterment and improvement to increase the total of human happiness through progress.

Progress does not necessarily mean greater complexity; it might involve a return to some previous more simple and harmonious relation with nature. But it was understood as a feat of emergence, of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In this, humanity, even whilst being different from other animals, shares with similar complex and living systems their being as centres of self-interest against the universal drift of meaningless events.

This leads us to systems theory, which sees reality as composed of hierarchically ordered systems open to determination by the systems within which in turn they are contained. So, the individual as a biological system maintains and reproduces itself throughout its lifetime by digestion, excretion, growth and regrowth, relying upon psychological and other subsystems while being contained within the various levels of its society as a larger system.

Societies also follow the tendencies of their own development, within – in turn – economic, ecological and other still larger systems. In this context, human needs are defined in terms of sustaining the necessary conditions for the continued successful maintenance of the social system and if they are not met the behaviour of the system is disturbed, either at the level of individual or group sub-system or at the level of the society as a whole.

However, human beings are unique in not only being informed by but in forming their own environment through the use of tools. Tools transform objects not only literally but also conceptually; they distance consciousness from its immediate perceptions by forming a new purposive whole of means to ends with thought before action. A new and symbolic subsystem is thus created which is capable of self-steering, as the phrase is. Unlike inherited genetic information and animal communication by signalling, symbolic consciousness and the self-steering system it creates is capable of learning from past mistakes to act differently in future. This is what makes human beings, as the nineteenth century artist and socialist, William Morris said, ‘the learning animal’.

For, potentially at least, humanity can learn from the accumulated knowledge and experience of human and natural history that is contained in the culture we pass down the generations to decide our own purpose or point of our collective existence, within which individuals can also achieve their own satisfactions. Utopian ideals of a fixed end state of human development, whether as ‘communism’, ‘a free society’, or any other ‘state of grace’, can be forsaken. Instead, we need to develop and implement the collective knowledge of what is required for human survival. In this sense, nowadays survival has become Utopia. We can then decide where we go from there!

But it may be that we are not alone as beings that have consciousness of themselves in a universe that, despite its vastness, is seemingly pregnant with the possibilities for life and that we may share with other conscious beings, as Michael Polanyi put it in the conclusion to his 1958 philosophy of science, Personal Knowledge that I discussed in the last issue of The Philosophical Take-Away, ‘a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress… towards an unthinkable consummation.’

By Patrick Ainley

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt?(II) - The How and The Why: Are Cosmologies an Ontological Necessity?- By Richard James Marklew

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt?(II)

The How and The Why: Are Cosmologies an Ontological Necessity?

The physical and social sciences are epiphenomena of society and culture –  perpetually malleable, subject to extraneous socio-political, historical and cultural stimuli; however, also an arbiter moulding them through the proliferation of socio-cultural products. Thus, in order to dissect and form discussions around atheistic beliefs, one must realise the interdependency with the organizational and symbolic world they inhabit – mostly academic, sometimes popular. A multitude of nuances, mythologies and litanies are immensely important to the atheistic cosmology – specialised litanies from different fields whittle a specialised atheism propounded through different explanations such as that of the physicist or sociobiologist.

            A scrupulous inquisition into the nature of belief, experience and being is essential in understanding anyone's faith. After careful inquiry one can make salient that atheistic cosmologies provide a certain ontological necessity, analogous to any explanation of the phenomenology of the world on which we dwell; a facet, just one strand in a vast interwoven array that entangles man.

The faithful being

This being can be divided into several categories: The human entity as matter; as a socio-cultural symbolic classification; the psychological manner, or the self – the operation of psyche in (Morris 1994:10- 13) relation with situational/environmental, biological, neurological and socio-cultural constraints which guides the actions of the being in its entirety. The self, from one perspective, is the captain of a ship on a tumultuous sea, commanding a course in accordance with the environment and the structure of the vessel – this is not to infer a Cartesian split, for the vessel in itself can demand and dictate the actions of the captain. The self is a creature of limited will.

            The entity as matter is a phenomenon which encompasses both object and agent, which can be perceived by others in a myriad of ways. Thus, in talking of the faithful being, one must talk about the experiential aspects of the self as the conduit through which stimuli is both ingested, ruminated and expelled back through self-other relations. The faithful being rationalises phenomena based on culturally constructed categorisations of the world which are by no means concrete themselves. By contrasting atheistic beliefs against other cosmological world views through the medium of the self, one can extrapolate if atheists experience stimuli through cosmological mediums. Therefore, serving a psycho-cultural purpose which is a fundamental construction – and here I may be a step too bold – which is universal.

On the subliminal

Let me start this half with a little vignette, which may serve to illustrate my point:

I came to the boundary of the metropolis. It was the first time the stars relinquished themselves from bindings of light pollution...How wonderful that radiation is coming forth from a nuclear fusion reaction billions of miles away and probably hitherto passed and dead...But why matter at all? Why a molecule, electrons, photons e.t.c?

           

The subliminal experience, once rationalised, of myself seeing the stars can be classified as a  symbolic experience. I became overwhelmed, and merely experienced for a while, then had a mechanistic description come to mind - but still wondered why matter?  An experience shaped by socio-historical scientific dogmas – most certainly ascribed atheistic myths - also a cosmological experience and symbolic explanation bound by cultural webs. One thing is certain, that the way I rationalised the experience of the stars was part of my own internalised collection of  mythologies. Myths, that as Midgley states:...are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning'(Midgley 2011: 1)

            The theist could explain this experience coherently to the atheist. He may say a God has placed those stars there, without even a mechanistic description. All earthly matter may not be important to him, as it is explained by the will of God... But, still ask:Why God – the primordial matter to the theist?..The theist is awaiting heaven for this explanation. Atheism is content with doubt and faith in a present life, as endeavouring to answer the question of matter. However, that does not refute my claims that it is a cosmology. Just reasserts them as a faith in doubt with a commitment to the present.

The cosmological event

Mechanistic explanation are not alien to a theist, for a Christian will say a person died by being hit by a car, but it was gods will – they are likely to put the death down to some human fault, god did not push the man in front of the car, but it was the right time for him to be taken. Thus, the mechanistic, everyday experiential element is not removed, but an additional explanation is conflated to the mechanistic explanation as a conduit through which emotions such as grief and loss can be controlled. The atheist may lack the belief in an afterlife, but deals with bereavement in an equally efficient fashion; The human experiential life is unpredictable and we all must die and our matter be redistributed, creating a symbolic recognition of death based on a shared fate of humans. Thus, a symbolic rationalisation of death is constructed, hardly differing from the notion of the shared fate of humans to be judged or reincarnated.

           

In an infamous ethnography on the Azande,  Evans-Pritchard became fully conscious to the fact that 'the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events' (Evans-Pritchard 1976:18). To put in brief Azande cosmology is an incredibly difficult task, as Evans-Pritchard points out: 'It is no use saying to a Zande 'now tell me what you Azande think about witchcraft' because the subject is too general and indeterminate, both too vague and too immense, to be described concisely' (ibid. p.23). However, the most salient features are that witchcraft is a psychic act; a hereditary condition; that it manifests itself as a blackish swelling, Evans-Pritchard determines on the information provided by his interlocutors that it is somewhere near the xiphiod cartilage; only sorcerers can utter spells; many oracles, diviners etc. are employed to combat and find the source. Witchcraft, is seen as an almost unconscious act, caused by social disruption, one often will find the be-witched is prey to someone with whom one had  a fray with in the past. (ibid).

            Even early ethnographic accounts such as this, however provide immense value when one envisions the rift between everyday perception of causality and cosmological explanations; between sensing stimuli, rationalising and an ultimate reality. For instance, if one looks at examples regarding death amongst the Azande and then relates it to the car vignette, one will almost certainly find no differing conditions...God didn't push the accelerator; Neither did witchcraft...

            In the case of a man that committed suicide, Evans-Pritchard enquired into the full nature of the event from one of the community members, eventually getting a response that the man had killed himself by hanging; this he did because he was angry with his brothers; But, witchcraft caused the man to kill himself because only the mentally ill commit suicide (ibid, P24).  One can see how this differs only slightly from atheistic cosmological views. Three causal events happened, and indeed the third – the mental illness – is the most important as it is the causal event which requires an explanation. An explanation of psychological depression through social rejection or discontentment resulting in suicide would be the atheists cosmological explanation, akin to the theory of bewitchment.  Cosmology is based on the Why not the How (ibid).

            As he later states:

           

            'Zande belief in witchcraft in no way contradicts empirical knowledge of cause and effect.           The world known to the senses is just as real to them as it is to us. We must not be deceived   by their way of expressing causation and imagine that because they say a man was killed by     witchcraft they entirely neglect the secondary causes that, as we judge them, were the true cause of his death' (ibid, P.25).

Similarly, one should not be deceived by an atheistically grounded explanation of causality. Atheistic conflations of Why to the How, is one facet of an ontological necessitation to understand certain events. One must understand that it is only certain events. For, it is a fallacy for one to believe ones cosmology is consciously phosphorescent in logically deciphering every stimuli one encounters... I don't think about the molecules in my coffee I am currently drinking...Although I am thinking about all those lovely neurotransmitters... Now, I am consciously considering my coffee as it is ordained by my current situation, which required such an analogy...Thus, as I will suggest later, enquiries into the nature of consciousness, agency and ethics arise from such mild contemplations on cosmological categorisations/rationalisations of the phenomenological world through the conduit of the self.

Conclusion?

Through a logical contemplation of what atheism provides for those who adhere to it, one can delineate the possibilities of an ontological necessitation of  why akin to any cosmological world-view. Unearthing innumerable questions which must be investigated; If a cosmology is an ontological necessity, why is this so?..Does the conflated why provide evidence that reality is a consequence of cognition, not a prerequisite?..What are the socio-historical events that lead to a rise in atheism and why is it a cosmology that purports western ideological conceptions of egocentricism(Midgley 1999 & Foucault 2002[1966])?..If atheism has no ascribed moral code, what can this tell us about ethics?

It is my belief that an engaged philosophical enquiry that utilised knowledge afforded us by other social and bio-psychological sciences can help to answer such questions, and that the questioning of belief does not stop at atheism, it starts: A new brand of ontological anthropology and a fresh turn to Metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology.

By Richard James Marklew

Bibliography

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles, And Magic Among The Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Foucault,M. (2002[1966]). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Oxon: Routledge

Midgley, M (1999) 'The Origins of Don Giovanni: if our genes are selfish, does that mean we are too?'. Philosophy Now (25): 32-34

Midgley, M. (2011). The Myths We Live By. Oxon: Routledge

Morris, B (1994). Anthropology of The Self: The individual in cultural perspectives. London: Pluto Press

All is well that ends well. - By Lloyd Duddridge

All is well that ends well.

You will die one day. You really really will. One day they will lower you into the ground,or as I would prefer, burn you to ashes. Existence will be ended. No Heaven, no everlasting happiness,no reunions with loved ones lost. Why should there be? Imagine an endless life,no form,no definition no meaning. Just a blob of life. A piece of plasticine. 

The fact that you have one shot at the thing they call life is its greatest gift and tragedy. The fact that you live once forces you to choose. It is a rationing process and some will get more than others. Life does not respect equality. It shouts at us and says one word. Pick. Many will deny life its voice and say can't one love everyone equally. These people are the deniers of life. These are the people who have the conceit they will live for ever. These are the foolish. 

Intelligence is the ability to choose well. It is nothing more and nothing less. You choose well you are an intelligent person. The meaning of life starts in the recognition that you will not be eternal. Life begins when one understands what Shakespeare means by ‘’All’s well the end well’ even the most beautiful song would deafen us it if never ended. Why should we be any more beautiful than a song? 

A good life is one that has more happy days than sad ones. There is no law more powerful than that. Have faith without being crippled by it. Pick your friends carefully. A good friend is an elixir. Trust a sentimental mind. They will remember the things you love. Remember that every spark is extinguished. True commitment is what you rebuild in the ensuing power cut.  

Life is a kiss, too short and it feels rushed and unloved ,too long and its becomes nothing more than froth. Surround yourself with beautiful people, but love them even more when they become old, which they will. 

Justice does not exist in nature, it is humanities thing, be proud of that. Do not respect reputations, apart from your own. Shout at the pompous or even better laugh at them. Throw at least one punch in your life. Tell God, you got this one. Desire only freedom. Don’t love only that which you don’t have. Look around once a day at what you do have. Never allow excuses for suffering. There is no defence for it. Never trust a person who uses phrases like ‘not in the real world or ‘ in reality’.  If you see a way to make things better choose that path. 

Some things you will never get over. Don’t fear though, these things define you. Go to at least one wedding, and fight for him or her. Take a sad song and make it better. Create patterns. Do not let patterns create you. Rules are great if they enrich, terrible if they suffocate. There are no guilty pleasures. Ask questions, even when you think they are stupid. After all they thought every genius was stupid at the start. Write down your dreams. Words after all are a net. Miss people, really miss them. Then when they least suspect it call them, and watch them smile. 

At least once in your life make a person laugh and cry at the same time. Try and sleep well, there is no greater pleasure. Sing in the shower,and sing in the street. Make noise, make your presence felt. Leave a tattoo on the world. As with one on your skin it often takes pain to get you there. If you can, because its not always possible spend your last evening with the one who knows you best. Every other evening as well if you can. 

Listen to a piano, God does not exist but if he did that would be his voice. The Camera can lie. In fact so can everything. Be sceptical it will give you strength. However innocent till proven guilty. Don’t jump, slide it is much cooler. Rant and rave, love and crave. Remember how powerful your words are. Remember that your touch is even stronger than that. 

Hell is regret. It is easy to get to hell, but hard to get out of it. They only way is to say what you feel. To go out into the jungle the world and capture that which is precious. Man is far closer to a magpie than an ape. Select people. Trust people. Love is always a choice. 

Make the most out of your portion,season it how you want. The really smart need hardly any sauce at all. They only use that which gets rid of the bitter. Build your own ark. Please read one more book than you think you can. Let your only addiction be life,and even then quit.

Lloyd Duddridge

God is out of our way / Nature is my teacher - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

God is out of our way / Nature is my teacher

  Purpose is a word we have created. We have each of us loosely learnt the meaning of this word, and now we play with it, like a cat does a woollen ball. Purpose, however, is far beyond a mere, human word...

  Supposedly, we live in an era where god (absolute purpose) is dying, and this has apparently caused rather a lot of mischief among people trying to find their way through their relatively comfortable lives. Yet one should not be shaken by the slow, tortured death-rattle of god - He was never true to begin with. To say that the death of god means the end of an absolute purpose for humanity, is akin to saying we can no longer fly because our steamship had succumbed to paddle-rot, and is now beyond repair. Old humanity (to continue this dodgy metaphor) was trying to fly with a boat, something that quite simply cannot be done. The inevitable death of religion is nothing to be lamented, for no one in those religions ever flourished on anything beyond childish ignorance and a need to belong (innocent and understandable traits). Religion was no provider of meaning to people beyond arbitrary dogmas; ultimately, it was an archaic means of controlling people, and therefore a purely political entity, completely devoid of any spirituality. We should celebrate the decay of religion, it is one more veil removed from our mortal gaze, and has opened the door to...

  ...absolute meaninglessness? Individuals acting after their own self-interest to fulfil some short term, materialistic goal? Create-yourself-consumer-capitalism? No. Only someone who truly expected the old god to provide their life with meaning and purpose will feel downhearted by His slow demise. Only the weak and the vulnerable soul will find any form of satisfaction in the mundanity of all-consuming materialism. In fact, the death of god is very much a necessary part of our ascension into the lofty realms of purpose! Let us celebrate, one and all, for now we are truly free from ignorance, and the path to understanding has been paved for us.

  Many will tell you then, that it is now up to humanity to guide itself, and create its own rules. This assumes that we are capable of doing so through language and obvious conscious effort. Indeed, it is a romantic idea that human beings will generate their own purpose by coming to some conclusion in the individuals mind, but sadly it cannot be done like this.

  We are creatures of in-built ability; sometimes this materializes in an unexplainable genius, who can create things beyond what a pure 'blank slate' could generate. This is understandable - of course we will flourish, that is what nature has designed us to do! It also means that finding our purpose does not rely purely on our own conscious acts of self creation, but on an understanding of our place in nature and therefore of self discovery. Besides our conscious efforts must stand the equally important understanding of our essence – to grasp what it is to be born a creative being.

  Your body is a biological machine, and we must not discount the innate abilities of that machine in creating our purpose: Think of an artist painting, a writer writing, a musician playing, all of these creatives have made some conscious decision to create, and require training to hone their skills - but once they start the creative process, it is their bodies that take over!

  Everywhere we see the triumph of the machine beside humanity. Indeed, what would we be without our machines but uncreative struggler’s in the bosom of wild nature. We are more than this, we are a powerful element of ordered nature. We are not removed from nature, for it exists in the creature that is currently typing, and reading, this article. Humanity is only left with this 'create yourself from scratch' mindset when we view ourselves as somehow completely transcendent to, and opposed to nature. And this mindset leads to the emotional torture of self-creation-without-foundations, in which we have nothing more than shaky conscious experiences to build on. We cannot just magic meaning for ourselves out of thin air; that is quite simply self-delusion.

  In conclusion, everyone is skilled, everyone is valueable. Not one human being on this planet deserves to be sold short (even an animal should be left to flourish if its suffering can be avoided). We are a part of nature (the 'brain' part), we always were, we always belonged; god was just a foolish way to seperate ourselves from our real objectives for the sake of political power.

  What seperates us from our nature now is our reliance/worship of experience to gain knowledge and our extreme scepticism of there being any meaning at all (all very useful tools, but taken to their extremes they have major drawbacks).

  The only problem is, not everyone has been given the materials and encouragements needed to actualize their innate potential; not everyone has been given the opportunity to stand proud as the mirror of nature, the most creative being in the known universe. Our purpose is to discover what it means to be human, and then to create on top of this foundation as an individual person, eventually providing this thriving opportunity to everything that breathes.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it - By Martin Prior

There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it

Let’s have a look at this bearing in mind the quip, that socialists are supposed to believe “there is no god, and Karl Marx is his prophet”.

First of all we must recognise that the 'purpose of life' raises problems that are linguistic, political and social. I shall first outline the linguistic problems, and then look at the social and political problems, which are indeed interrelated.

The 'purpose of life' might be general, such as the 'purpose for which there is life', or the purpose for an individual to stay alive. But I think it must also be a social concept, where life is seen as a social activity, and where some people might achieve this purposes more than others.

Let us consider this linguistic issue - where some languages might have to use different phrases for different interpretations - and let us look at the first interpretation. Now life came into being at some stage, and perhaps finds a suitable and stable form after fits and starts. But when survival requires conscious pursuits, the 'purpose' is for example more likely to be sex than the survival of the species. But this involves interaction between two individuals, when in fact wider interaction is required. Such wider interaction will include such things as the desire to protect. To my mind, this is the key element of love, but clearly it may be more general than that.

So I have suggested both sex and love as things focussed upon when the real goal is the survival of the species. So perhaps we can say that the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species.

So we can see a circularity: the purpose of life is love, and the purpose of love is life.  Likewise for other things we may have mentioned or have still to mention.

And if the purpose of life is merely a circularity, can there in fact be any meaningful purpose of life? 

Well, I am going to try and tease this circularity by re-introducing a model of socialism that I presented in last fortnight’s issue, see opposite:

Note the three stages of green: from the outermost, the untamed environment, culture (the outer maroon) creates a ‘semi-tamed’ environment.  From this technology and skills, the pink, create the tamed environment, including health and education, which permits our socialist society, represented by the ‘inner circle’.

(  The red is of course just ornament :]  )

So is socialism the purpose of life: is life for socialism?  Not at all, socialism is for life.  Here there is no circularity.  But as I have suggested, the purpose of life is those activities we directly pursue, because we have been evolved to pursue these activities to ensure the survival of the species.  And, circularity or not, this lies firmly in the outer maroon, outside and indeed pre-dating any knowledge or technology (pre-Eve?)

So the purpose of socialism should be a fair opportunity for members of society to pursue such a purpose of life – not to destroy it in the name of progress.

By Martin Prior

A seemingly meaningless life - By: Eliza Veretilo

A seemingly meaningless life

Down and up mountains

Across vast valleys

Walking in inner city streets

There are people, many people searching for the meaning of life.

I found myself asking the same question

Never finding

Always in the process of becoming, of looking, of feeling imperfect

The meaning of human life

Is to find every moment perfect.

Accepting yourself,

And that everything is alive

For what purpose you may ask?

The meaning of life lays in simply being.

Words can kill what I want to express

The medium can kill the message

The meaning of life is to become one with your existence.

Like a tree. Like a tiger. Like a stream.

They just are. We just are.

We are information, consciousness and awareness in this vast universe.

A beautiful possibility actualised.

We can be free.

Our meaning lays in being, not in reacting.

I found the meaning of life in your eyes

I saw the eternity of Spinoza’s god in your eyes.

I saw the purposefully existence of your eyes in your eyes.

I saw love. I am love. I found love in your eyes.

The meaning of life is truly personal

Alone but not lonely

The meaning of life is truth

And truth is a pathless life, a seemingly meaningless life.

By: Eliza Veretilo

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt? (I) - By Richard James Marklew

Litany and the Laboratory: Atheistic Cosmologies of Doubt? (I)

Cosmological communities and Self-stylization

An era of spatio-temporal compression experienced through communicative tools have afforded us hitherto unknown connections to others; the metaphysical non-place of a social networking site; instantaneous access to entertainment and live feeds of current events. An innumerable quantity of information on an immense variety of subjects is available to consume via various mediums of expression - be it a youtube video, a tweet or an academical journal. We now live in a world, as Midgley puts it where 'our trade,our investment and our expressions of public opinion do indeed affect all sorts of distant events'(Midgley 2011:11). This new epoch of human experience, somewhat mysterious and intensely shocking due to a seemingly radical and extemporaneous appearance, through a conduit of technology and rapid incrementation of population, has forced a re-conceptualisation of so many facets of social organization and ethical conduct for a connected multifarious world.  It is not only creating space for atheist communities, but more importantly to this inquiry, shaping the way we construct self identity:

            'stylization in music, in dress, in politics in all aspects of personal and intimate life is part of         a drive to give form not only to the self, but to the world, and to the relations with others. It is an obstinate search for a style of existence,  a way of being. It accounts, in part, for the     massive drive towards authenticity, truth and reality that is observable in so many different            domains of life around the globe' (Moore 2011:2).

Thus, religious choice must be seen as intersubjective to extraneous forces hauling at our very concept of self and self-other relationships. Our socio-cultural conditions  are unconsciously  interwoven with our emotions and dictate the selves we decide to show to the world.

            'Our unconscious desires exert a powerful influence on our subjectivities and our behaviour.       They also structure the form and expression of our manifest desires...desire is both personal          and relational, and as such it is always bound up with self-stylization and self-other relationships: who am I for myself and for others?' (Moore 2011:29)

Therefore, it is as much an unconscious choice to be an atheist through the assimilation of  ideas,  social influence and mythology (see Midgley 2002,2011 & 1999, Sahlins 1976) as it is a rational rejection of an omnipotent creator or any theistic belief. Atheism is a modern cosmology for specific cultural communities in a new epoch of human history. The supercilious purporters of militant atheism will vanish as this reductionist conception  will hopefully be vanquished by the former atrocities associated with it[1] and the reflexivity the social sciences can offer – that in a time of technological, socio-political and cultural change, new cosmologies are bound to develop -a new cosmological phenomenon necessary to order and conceptualise the world amongst a certain cultural group.

            Dangers do arise from an analysis like this however, mainly that of a model of self-stylization in western-culture built around a dogmatic conception of an egocentric categorisation of self.  One cannot devalue Moore's analysis however as she speaks of the multifarious world of self-other relations built upon emotion, correlating with Hollan's suggestion that 'we begin to examine in greeter detail degrees of egocentricism or sociocentrism, openness or closedness, individulisation or relation, etc., within specific contexts' (Hollan 2010[1992] : 303).  The classification of the self, belittles the experiential self somewhat and could lead one down a blind alley in which we only conflate theories of being to accepted categorisations(ibid). Thus, one must try to refrain oneself from attempting a categorical approach to atheistic self-stylization based on dogmatic beliefs in an egocentric western self. One must research thoroughly before coming to the conclusion that atheism is just a form of self-identity that fits into the egocentric model of western identity.

Of Belief

The Interconnectivity of  the Verb, the Voice & the Psyche

To say I believe can never be detachable from states of psyche, as Wittgenstein  purports in his 'philosophical investigations': '96. “I Believe...” throws light on my state. Inferences about my conduct can be drawn from this utterance. So there is a similarity here to manifestations of emotion, of mood, and so on.(Wittgenstein 2009 [1953]:200e)' through this reasoning one can extrapolate certain fundamental aspects of atheist beliefs; that it is completely interconnected with emotionality, and more importantly, we can see emotionality as being bound to several facets of human experiential existence. The innumerable facets of the human and natural environment are delicately in a state of flux . Through the logic of Wittgenstein and the realisation of the interconnectivity and effect-causality relationships of the interplay of these environments, one can respect that belief in an atheistic mythology permeates unfathomably into the experiential and reflective beings. Guiding his actions and perception of reality a substantial amount. However, for one to end an argument as loosely as this is unforgivable, for one must take into account the notable refutations made against this sort of linguistic reasoning (Gellner 2005 [1959]) as a method in which 'conceptual issues are said to arise in isolation from substantive ones' (ibid, p344). One must also fear there is problem  in not appreciating pragmatics. Thus, one must substantiate a claim such as this with evidence of the interconnectivity of the verb, the voice, the symbolic word and emotive activity. An inquiry I fear is to complex to convey succinctly in this article, however it is something I am working on currently and something we already have a vast literature on. (Ingold 2000, Dolar, 2006, Velmans 2009, Lambek 2010 (eds))

The Ambivalent Verb: A socio-cultural specificity?

Belief is also an ambivalent term that can express doubt, it expresses a certain expectation of a phenomenon or experience whilst simultaneously expressing some kind of scepticism (Pouillon 2008[1979]). Pouillon delineates that the western ambivalence of the verb is due to Christian linguistic and conceptual dogmatism born through the conflicts against the many other faiths it has encountered, and it's ingrained ideology against false idols: 'He must simultaneously assume both his affirmation and the challenge to it, [science, other faiths, and the idea of “false gods”] a challenge that belief is, nonetheless supposed to make impossible on its own level...the contradiction is inside his own faith, and that is “to believe”' (ibid, p94). Thus, one can see that western scepticism is ingrained in our very conceptions of the world, scientific scepticism and belief in atheistic cosmologies could be born from the one thing it stands against. If one reversed the positions of an Atheist and Christian, one would find the same dogmatic attacks against the ideas of false idols and ideology. Anyone who has witnessed Dawkins' scathing and crepuscular attacks on religion has heard him preach about the worship of false idols, as proven by his Darwinian mythology. The paradoxical nature of “to believe” is embedded within our own socio-cultural and historical conceptions, thus we see that scientific scepticism is not so removed from Judeo-Christian religious ideology.

By Richard James Marklew

Bibliography

Dolar, M (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. London: The MIT Press

Gellner, E. (2005 [1959]). Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy. Oxon: Routledge

Hollan, D (1992) 'Cross-Cultural Differences In The Self', in Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture, Robert A. LeVine (2010) (eds) pp. 295 – 308. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Ingold, T (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Oxon: Routledge

Lambek, M. (eds) (2010)  Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press

Midgley, M (1999) 'The Origins of Don Giovanni: if our genes are selfish, does that mean we are too?'. Philosophy Now (25): 32-34

Midgley, M (2002). Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears. Oxon: Routledge

Midgley, M. (2011). The Myths We Live By. Oxon: Routledge

Moore, H. (2011). Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions. Cambridge: Polity

Pouillon, J (1979) 'Remarks on the Verb “To Believe”', in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, Michael Lambek (2008) (eds) pp. 90-97. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Sahlins, M (1976). The Use and Abuse of Biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology. London: Tavistock Publications

Velmans, M. (2009) Understanding Consciousness. Hove: Routledge

Wittgenstein, L (2009[1953]). Philosophical Investigations. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell

---

[1]    Social Darwinism, Polygenesis, Social Evolutionism, Scientific racism