(After reading John Fowles, ‘Aristos’, p20, nos. 40, 45)
We invest meaning in a possibly purposeless, meaningless universe in the same way in which we see constellations in apparently neighbouring stars. In reality, these distant burning suns lie millions of light years apart and—from any other angle than ours here on earth—would form unrecognisable patterns. Identifying patterns is understandable; it helps us make sense of the sheer numbers, because familiar groups of stars can count as a single unit, but the patterns only exist for us. They’re not really out there, at least, not in the way we see them.
There is no beginning and no end. We have only the sense of duration caused by the rotations, orbit, and finite life of ourselves and the planet we live upon. If this is so, then how can there be any aim, any goal, other than the temporary and relative goals of conscious beings like ourselves? We invent daily an endless stream of conditional justifications for our otherwise meaningless activities. We create reasons to live and act, set ourselves goals to lend purpose to existence, when it has no real purpose. At the most primal level perhaps we locate our purpose, the reason for our existence, in our very capacity to develop purpose and reason in an otherwise vast and apparently purposeless universe, knowing all the time that this same universe will eventually break it all down again.
By definition, purpose cannot be infinite—save in the purest and most abstract sense—because it suggests an end, a goal towards which it is aiming. A purpose that is infinite is therefore not a purpose but, because of its omnipresence, it becomes a fact of existence. The principle of purpose also presupposes meaning. But if there is no real meaning, if meaning is a human construct devised to make life liveable, then purpose must also be a purely human construct.
If—excepting the relative purposefulness of our inventions—our lives are purposeless, how do we live? Human existence seems in this case to consist of a series of invented purposes; of goals based upon the human device of patterns of invented meaning, both attainable and unattainable (it doesn’t seem to matter which). Goals provide evidence of meaning, and meaning helps sustain the idea of purpose—a purpose we invest in our actually purposeless existence. Nothing really means anything, except to the being who invests it with meaning.
circa 1989?