From: brm@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Brian R. Murphy)
Subject: Re: Why I'm such a shit
Organization: none
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 05:12:40 GMT

In article <DUKE.92Dec18182926@portal.paperboy.osf.org> duke@portal.paperboy.osf.org (Duke Robillard) writes:

>So, a couple of years ago, I find alt.angst.  At the time, it was
>filled with people sharing the same kind of opinions, reaching the
>same kind of conclusions, whistling in the Dark of Despair, and making
>snide remarks about the hopelessness of existence.

been there.  read that.  was too angstful to post.

>But for the last year or so, alt.angst has been gradually filling up
>with people who are not concerned with these issues.  They are
>concerned with failing relationships, unhappy childhoods, and the lack
>of sex.  This bummed me out.  In some sense, sine is the epitome of
>this anti-angst alt.angst.  Hence I lash out, attacking her when she
>hasn't really done anything to me.  Then I feel bad about it.  Pass
>the Strychnine

well, if Angst is an essential feature of any conscious being (as
people like Heidegger would have us believe), then there must be some
way that people have survived up to this point.  almost everyone i've
ever known has either been too busy dealing with the world, wrapped up
in everyday affairs or relationships, to bother feeling the angst
(except on rare occasions) or has been troubled enough that they lose
the rhythm, fall out of the little cultural dance that takes away and
hides the angst, and drown in it instead.

in short, troubles of almost any sort lead to a discontentment with
life which reveals angst to the troubled one.  successful
relationships, sex, and a number of other things keep one from feeling
it.  so many people get here (alt.angst) through a failed distraction
and, believe that their failed relationship is the cause of what they
feel.  that's why we get lots of posts from people whining about life
problems.  they suffer from some sort of breakdown of their self-world
relationship and the true nature of their situation (and resultant
angst) is revealed, although they mistake it for something else.

[out of order inclusion:]
>I'm pretty sure existence is meaningless.  Once you give up
>superstition (or religion or whatever), there seems to be a
>straightforward logical progression to the conclusion that you're just
>a chemical machine.  A machine that spends its time reacting in ways
>that, evolutionarily speaking, tend to cause the generation of more,
>similar chemical machines.  The Universe doesn't care.  God is an
>invention to help change the behaviour of said machines in ways that
>will increase the population.
>
>This is all very logical, and doesn't require any leap of faith, or
>any belief in something that we don't understand currently.  This
>makes it incredibly attractive, intellectually.  Unfortunately, it's
>also incredible depressing.

i (along with many people) have gone through the same rational
thinking about life and the universe and come to the same conclusion.
however, one thing doesn't quite fit into this universal explanation,
and that is consciousness.  [assuming that you are a conscious entity]
how do you account for the fact that you ARE conscious?  what does
that mean?  it seems to transcend the material word, doesn't it?  it's
something you have from the start, before any scientific examination
of what your senses tell you about the world outside leads you to a
materialistic world view.

how is this to be explained?  lots of people have struggled with this
(mind-body) problem.  who knows?

like, you, i've also long believed that "existence is meaningless."
but what do we mean by that?  what we really care about is ourselves:
what is the meaning of my existence?  yet Heidegger and other
phenomenologists would say [killing terminology and mutilating complex
concepts for conciseness] that in order to exist as a conscious being
i have to exist wrt a world view, and i have to have an attitude
towards it.  sure, i exist alone, i _am_ in a world which is just
(possibly baseless) phenomena, but i have some _way_ of being, some
_intent_ in the way that i exist.  in short, there is some a priori
meaning to my existence.  it may not be the same as yours or anyone
else's, so attempting to define any universal meaning would be
fruitless.

in an ultramaterialistic world view you might say that i have some
meaning evolved and beaten into me before my brain is developed enough
to be really conscious.  whether i like it or not, it's there by the
time i can think of it.  i may not know what it is, but my life has
intent from the start.

in my case (speaking personally), i now believe that an attempt to
deny that is at the root of most of my Angst.  perhaps that's 'cause
i'm blessed with a self-contradictory self-meaning for which any
expression other than self-negation is very difficult to find.  like
sine, i could point out some failed relationships and life problems
which are instantiations of that (perhaps i will in a later posting),
but i'd rather work within the explicit, logical, unemotional system
you seem to share and try to find a solution.  there may not be one,
but i feel like i'm finally approaching one that works for me.  i've
found it a bit reassuring to have an answer to "what's the point?"
even if it's "there is one; i may not be able to state it explicitly
right now, but i can feel it, if i try."  in a way, this attempt to
stay within a rigid, logical, unemotional way of dealing with things
was part of that self-denial, since i used rationality to avoid facing
my real feelings about life (since they were founded in
non-angst-based pain).  at the same time, though, i also avoided
realizing where i wanted to go, and floundered about in a life devoid
of meaning, which (i _think_) was just an artifical construction.  the
real world, my real life, also includes my feelings about the world
and what i want to do with it.

now, through an unusual chain of events, i've suddenly become a little
bit aware of how i really feel, and realize that maybe life isn't
pointless, isn't meaningless, isn't hopeless.  it has what i bring it,
or perhaps rather, i am brought to life with it.  perhaps i can't
reason about it, can't rationalize it (since everything i do is
predicated upon it), but i can at least feel that there is an order to
my world.

maybe it's a dumb self-justification, but so what?

					-Brian

btw, i usually enjoy reading sine's postings, although they aren't
really about angst.  i never really expect to see much about real
angst, since the most angstful probably never post (or even read news;
why bother?) while a good abstract philosophical discussion of the
nature of angst is probably too intellectually draining to be
attempted by all but the rare Heideggers of the world (who probably
don't read news either)...
Newsgroups: alt.angst,alt.suicide.holiday