Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Fabric

There is, even in this post-humanist and post-human world, a quest for an eternal truth, that singular truth that all of humanity could come to recognise, accept and embrace; that truth that could 'set us free', could free us from the shackles of ignorance that has led to war, suffering, confusion, destruction.

Yet no one really knows what that truth is - some say it's God, some say a transcendental signified. No one truly knows. And as postmodernists incessantly chant, 'there is no truth' for there are only signifiers, signs that gesture to other signs. Meaning is unstable and consequently the very foundations of all of society - all institutions, all belief structures, all discourses, all ideologies, and life itself.

'Nothing comes of nothing.' So chants Lear. There lies only a chasm, deep, dark, unfathomable, infinite, a chasm of nothingness.

Yet that nothingness seems unacceptable: we struggle to find meaning in existence, in the mundane things we do, in the quests we undertake trivial as they are. But what do all these amount to? Where does it all go when it ends? What meaning is there when consciousness ends?

Perhaps there is none, only the superficial pursuits of wealth and fame.

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