An Island Unto...

Man is condemned to be free
--Sartre

All you’ve come to know was once unknown to you, and there is so much more left to learn, yet it would be impossible to form a meaningful idea about just how much it is that you still don’t know. You are aware of the existence of knowledge that others have which you don’t. You would even admit that there must exist knowledge had by others which you have not considered. And then, of course, there are things yet undiscovered by anyone. All of the books in all of the libraries on this planet contain a mere fraction of what humans have come to know in the relatively short time we have been around, and this knowledge is seemingly infinitesimal in terms of all that we have yet to discover about ourselves, our planet and the universe.

Faced with such an abysmal lack of understanding, it might seem pointless to ask questions about the grand scheme of things, let alone one’s role in it. To refer to a scheme at all is a very human thing to do. We want things to make sense, which is evidenced by the order out of disorder we see all around us. Yet, to try and make some semblance of sense of something which you have incomplete knowledge of requires stretching the imagination. And, since what you can imagine is limited by your experience, it seems likely that you will come to quite different conclusions than others will when considering the abstract.

You are the experiencer, the perceiver. To say you are one of many experiencers is to say that you perceive the collective presence of others in the world and accept that they exist as you do. However, what you accept as truth based on your perceptions doesn’t change the fact that the only perceptions you are truly aware of are your own. Even if you believe that the world and the living beings you perceive all around you do truly exist, you must accept that you are the prime experiencer. Of this, there can be no doubt.

Knowledge is limited by experience. If you were to have been shut off from the rest of the world from birth, kept in solitary confinement without any information available to you about what there was outside your isolated existence, what would you be? What would you think about your existence? To what degree would you consider its meaning? Constrained by the limits of our own perceptive abilities, we must necessarily conclude that existential meaning is completely subjective.

You were thrown into the world, and at some point in time, you became self-aware and soon after realized you were a hostile participant in a game you hadn’t chosen to play. After a long, slow transformation, you went from wanting to change the rules of the game to suit your desires to wanting to become better at playing by the rules as they stood. Or, did you?...