My philosophy changes my psychology

I am getting the nerve to write some very fluffy stuff here, so my apologies to those who do me the kindness of reading these posts.  My reason is, however, as solid as I am able to get: My thoughts about ontology and psychology coincide, as I get older.

"One of the chief results of the effort of the last hundred years of European philosophy is the final establishment of the necessity for abandoning the quest for the reality behind the appearance."

James F. Sheridan, Jr., Ph.D.

Once More From the Middle, A Philosophical Anthropology

Ohio University Press, Athens, 1973, page 1*

The universe is a question mark.  It can’t tell itself what it is, obviously.  And there are no answers for us, because knowledge is simply our word for how we react to our perceptions.  That is, how we react to ourselves.  It is a different kind of ignorance.

The universe is blind and knowledge-less.  So instead of looking at it in wonder, or looking at it in weariness and poetic disgust – You are too far away to do me any damned good – we can look at All as permanently asleep.  Will it ever wake up?

Now, in our newness, we can destroy things or rearrange our planet.  Maybe in some billions of years we will rearrange the galaxies or the universe as a whole.  But it is still there: One can wake a person up.  One can’t wake the bed up.

It’s very sick to hurt people.  I wonder what the equivalent, the source of this is in inanimate matter, a rudimentary quality of mood or destruction in matter.  Is there some basic futility in the fundamental cosmos?  Does energy feel unfulfilled?  Does it feel free – think it is free – while actually being determined by its nature, like us?  And is that self-contradiction inherently painful?  Is Everything in depressive terror to be stuck, unmovable?  The universe can’t move, it is fixed.  As is God, who would be the exact size of everything.

The universe is the bed asleep, and we think we can see it, and feel it.  To me this is very sweet, a sweetness that undermines the legitimacy of hate, violence and destruction.  We are somewhat, a little more awake than the rest of entirety and this is such a great boon.  We should be happy.  And when we fail – when love dies or we are hurt by another – we should make some justice or collapse in pain, feel it.  To create havoc seems to me to be an error: assuming we are uniquely awake, different and better than the universe.

We are part of everything, yet violence is lonely-making: It is to reject the pain we are in, striking the hand that we need to soothe our forehead, raging to drown out or kill the hurt which can’t be drowned out or killed, because it exists.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have this sense that they would like the universe to wake up, tell them the meaning.  But just look at it, and see the question mark.  And if some alien race, or God appears to you in his superiority, point out the question mark to him.

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* My favorite philosophy professor, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA.