Peter Giger

In my research of blogging and its potential effect on culture (high culture…), I came across the below quoted text about Albert Camus:

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether God exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither exists, then you are a nihilist, someone who denies that life has meaning. Albert Camus is famous for expressing this kind of perspective, suggesting that the lack of an afterlife and of a rational, divinely ordered universe undercuts the possibility of meaning.

As I understand it, Camus say that all materialists are nihilists. Being a materialist myself, I have never really understood the importance of connecting to a universal or even social view of meaning. I create the meaning in my life together with the context I call my life world. From the viewpoint of materialism and evolution, a universal meaning of live has to be something biological created in the course of evolution, something like Nietzsche’s assertion of “the will power”, i.e. our inherent will to be a strong force in our own life. An evolution based assertion of the meaning of life is actually a little bit scary.

A few months ago there was a research report on the news stating that they had found a gene for male promiscuity. Eh, ok, well, I guess it’s perfectly all right to cheat on your wife then, I mean If you have it in your genes….

If there was a universal “meaning of life”, supernatural or biological, I would regard it as quite depressing. It would be like stealing my own meaning creating power, robbing me of one of the things I cherish most in life. Perhaps I’m trying to get at something like Nietzsche’s concept ’self creation’.