Truth: An Existentialist Rant

I suppose this post will be little more than an extension of my previous post. Previously I had said that the truth sometimes just sucks because it doesn't always, if ever, hold that mystical element we value in the meaning we construct for our lives and the things in our lives. But I found a quote from Jorge Luis Borges that I believe sums up, more or less, what I was trying to get at:

"...Reality has not the slightest obligation to be interesting.... reality may get along without that obligation, but hypotheses may not."
~Death and the Compass

And I suppose that's what the truth really boils down to: it isn't obligated to be interesting, and perhaps that is why the truth doesn't always seem as meaningful as we would like. The fact of the matter is that more often than not the truth seems to lack any sort of meaning for us, which is always unsettling.

Think of truth and its concern for our search for meaning as Lovecraft's monsters and horrid alien civilizations: they could easily exterminate us all without even breaking a sweat, but we are like an ant mount in Africa: it's too much effort for something that doesn't concern it. That is what really makes Lovecraft's monsters so terrifying: they don't actually care about the human race. I mean, if we get in their way, sure, they'll destroy us, but it isn't really worth the effort. We are not the center of the world. We really don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Such is the the case with the truth: it isn't obligated to fascinate us and fulfill those hollow searches of ours for meaning in our lives. Mostly because nothing really has any meaning in the first place. We construct the meaning in things to make ourselves feel better, which is more or less the basic principles of existentialist philosophy.

Nothing has any real inherent meaning unto itself. We might imagine that the Pyramids of Giza were quite meaningful to the Egyptians, and we will speculate on what the shape of the pyramid meant to the Egyptians. Some have speculated that they represented mountains that were a sort of gateway to the heavens, or that they mimic the shape of the top of an obelisk - an obelisk being a sort of petrified ray of the sun - and as such represented a ray of sunlight. But this is only what the pyramid meant to the Egyptians. They completely made that up. In reality - that is non-obligated reality to be interesting - the pyramid is a meaningless shape. The shape of a pyramid is nothing more than a solid with a square base and four triangular faces with eight edges and five vertices. It is meaningless unto itself. We are the ones who construct the meaning and apply it to completely meaningless things.

But that's the trick: we construct meaning for truth to be as interesting as possible to make up for how completely meaningless the truth actually is. The truth doesn't have to be meaningful. Our hypotheses and explanations for the truth, however, do have to be meaningful.

This is what I think Julia Sweeney was getting at when she said, "The truth is a poor competitor in the market place of ideas." Ideas have to interesting and meaningful. The truth doesn't give a shit about what is meaningful or interesting to us.

Reality is a lot like the Pyramids of Giza, really: it's just a great big heap of meaningless stuff that we constantly try to attach some interesting explanation to.