School is out

Well, it has felt like school is out after a heavy few days inserting other people's proof corrections into a master copy and producing an Index. All is in hand then for Philosophers and God, which should appear some time in the Spring: there are some interesting papers in it, though I say so myself. Anyway, I managed to get out of the house and do a circuit of the north end of the island, the sky blue, the wind not too hard, but one breathed it in like delicious sips of iced water. I was thinking about death again, though not for gloomy reasons. I wonder whether representations of it as an utterly bleak deprivation of sense is precisely a result of attempts to imagine one's own non-existence. There is heaven and there is Hell, of course, neither of which are 'non-existence'. For those who hope for the life to come the problem is that they cannot imagine the positive, only the absence of what belongs to this physical, mortal life. As for 'non-existence' or 'extinction', when the bubble bursts there is no bubble, when the flame is extinguished there is no flame.. Neither of these images are of the sensory deprivation that some people imagine as the negative aspect of a presumed or hoped for survival..

One cannot stress enough the significance of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith. I find it very difficult to think in terms of 'the meaning of life' or the idea that 'life has a meaning'. Both these expressions are predicated, historically, on the idea of a life to come, a life that will make sense of this one, restore the balance of justice and affliction and so forth. In the absence of these concepts ... the trouble is that people will then ask, well what is the meaning of life? Whereas, it seems to me that at best we are dealing in metaphor when we apply this term to 'life'. A person loves their life or hates it, they are anguished at the prospect of losing things they hold dear, they will be relieved of what causes them affliction, they want to live or they don't want to live, they live for this or they live for that, they are bored or in despair, they are absorbed and engaged, and so forth, these are the primary categories. In the absence of what we love, the presence of what we recoil from we might start talking of 'meaning' or 'loss of meaning', but these expressions are derivative and to understand them we have toi refer to what is primary.

I have just taken delivery of something completely different, Hutton's Arse.