Now I had started all of this with the intention of finding out, like Spinoza, that single principle with which I could be content. As time went on however, I was introduced to the multitude of thoughts and ideas, to the endless variety of answers which others had given to the same exact question, that purpose changed. Eventually, I realized I was no longer looking for that golden idea…I was looking for something else. Despite any misgivings and disagreements I may have had with any of those philosophers I’d studied, there was one thing I could never cease to admire, the sincerity with which they set out to find a path. Whether or not they ever thought they found it was immaterial, what counted was that they made a journey in the first place. After all, if one is truly sincere and honest about finding the answer to a burning question, would one ever dream of compromising the answer? By the time I had finished Nietzsche and moved on to more contemporary thought, the search had all but changed. It was now not an issue of what the answer was, I had arrived at the underlying question…was there an answer at all?
Thus I entered what could be described as a ‘night of the soul’, as I considered all possible options to the question. I couldn’t, in all conscience ignore any alternatives, no matter how unpleasant they may have seemed. Now the whole notion might strike some readers as strange, to put oneself through an episode like this for the sake of ‘intellectual integrity’ and honesty may seem downright arrogance and insanity. There’s not much I can say in this respect, other than this is an issue which cannot be easily conveyed outside the realm of personal experience. I was shaped under a particular perspective, and later sought to replace it with something that seemed truer and more fulfilling, undergoing a very personal process along the way. I had tried to absorb much of the framework of western thought, and had unwittingly thus also inherited its subconscious doubts and fears. The 20th century, with its catastrophic wars and events did little to eradicate any anxiety man may have had in terms of his place in the universe. Never in history had we seen life as frail, the world as puzzling and absurd, as we started to see it then. For the very first time we had the means and the ability to eradicate hundreds of thousands of lives in a single blow…and we did. How was this going to go unnoticed by the thinkers trying to figure everything out? There is no such thing as a philosopher holed up in a lofty ivory tower, the world and its times affect everyone’s perceptions. It’s no accident that two of the most prominent philosophers of the century were members of the French Resistance movement during WWII. Their philosophy? Existentialism.
Western thought had taken a serious hit with the advent of modernity and its grim realities. All faith and optimism in the symbols and ideals that had been discovered and established was lost. In fact, at times it took on a decidedly tragic character. Once he had fully comprehended the implications of stripping the world of a divine dimension, Nietzche saw man’s experience as akin to an exercise in Greek tragedy, and so scrambled to find a meaning in a theory of ‘eternal recurrence’. In the 1920s, in the wake of the Great War, Oswald Spengler defined the modern western spirit as ‘Faustian’, ever striving and seeking the Infinite, yet hopelessly unable to ever attain it. Two decades later, Albert Camus would come to the following conclusion: faced with an absurd world devoid of meaning and structure, man’s attitude was to be one of constant conscious revolt, tragic but dignified as he would put it.
The point of mentioning all this is to give an idea of the environment upon which I had tried to establish an identity. After all, I was born and shaped in a society which, in one way or another had been formed by many of these ideas.
