Posted by Brian Weatherson in Favourite
March 25th, 2003
Philosophy, Al Qaeda and the Meaning of Life
7 Responses to “Philosophy, Al Qaeda and the Meaning of Life”
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Dr Zen says:
“If modern life is somehow at odds with human nature, just which other time period is more in harmony with it.”
Saying why modern life is at odds with human nature does not necessarily imply that there ever was a time when it wasn’t. The reasons have differed could be all we are saying.
But don’t the Qutbistas believe that Mohammed’s Arabia is the model of a time when life was not out of sync with human nature? Or the time of the caliphs? The latter was after all a golden age of sorts for the Ummah.
I think your focus on how good life is exactly encapsulates what the Qutbistas deplore. Your focus – it seems – is on the material comfort our life brings (and don’t get me wrong, I’d wish that same comfort for the whole world) and ignores what you might call spiritual comfort as anything other than an offshoot of it.
You are suggesting, I think, that the signs of material comfort and its portrayers (the Victoria’s Secret catalogue copywriters) will win over the Qutbistas – how can they possibly not love the frilliness, the frothiness, the glee of our culture? Ultimately, if the “small ideas” of our culture are amounting to little more than “I like it lacy”, we have nothing to oppose to the great ideas that motivate the Qutbistas, no matter how misguided their ideas might be.
January 5th, 2004 at 9:04 am -
Dr Zen says:
I didn’t realise this was so old. Still, I enjoyed the article and thought it was worth a comment!
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Lech Dharma says:
Overattachment to material power and its consequential repression of spiritual purpose has become the mantra of the West. It results in the existential vaccum as defined by Viktor Frankl, where the people suffering from it turn to all the wrong things to fulfill their missing meanings of life; be they on a daily basis or grand-picture scale.
It is in the material manifestation, or lack thereof, of individual misguided spiritual purpose that evil patiently waits in the shadows; the devil is always in the “dogmatic” details.
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Niky Ring says:
I am worried about a philosophy that only sweats the small stuff, is concerned with ‘everyday living’, etc. We need big ideas to examine how we live, act, and think.
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McDuff says:
But everyday living is a big idea. Those searching for a “meaning of life” to provide some kind of worth to their existence on the planet will ultimately be frustrated, whether they turn to Buddha or NASCAR to provide it. The disappointment and spiritual unfulfilment felt by people is caused by their misguided notion that there is a meaning of life, and that if you don’t know it there’s something wrong with you.
The idea that there’s nothing there, so stop looking and go do something else with your life, is huge, which is why it is so easily rejected.
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Wallace Francis says:
This was an extraordinarily befuddled article so I can’t really comment on it. The only thing I can say is that fascism, as a concept, isn’t something we can ignore simply because the building we are in isn’t collapsing on us. It’s nihilism to suppose we should go and clean our dishes while a hundred million people have gone completely insane.
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wallace francis says:
Is the purpose of philosophy to give us a way to look at the world that benefits mankind in some way, or is it a recourse to intellectual masturbation for our own self-indulgence? I dread the thought of a conversation on utilitarianism. Perhaps Ed Abbey said it best: “When I hear the words “phenomenology” or “hermaneutics” I reach for my buck knife.
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