#meaninglessness

Life is an endeavor devoid of destination

A trek through an unmapped wilderness

Until calamity at last overwhelms vigor

Wrenching ambition from fearful fingers

Impermanence made irreversibly inert

Along the road to nonexistence

Myths germinate in borrowed bodies

Shared around campfires and repeated by mirror people

Purposes and pathways, the most consequential daydreams

Entropy trimmed to fit in the palm of your hand

Breathing amongst their tellers for a time

They dictate action and thought along their threadbare paths

Establishing remote margins of frail safety

From the placid creeping horrors of existing

Until their dissonance rings the hollow tone of the earth

Every voice yearns for a song in the face of nihility

Every story knits purpose from the dispassionate fabric of the void

Let us together then fill the vacuum with songs ringing of humility and empathy,

Drown out the stories of venom that drive pained and flimsy hearts to hate,

The difference between meaninglessness and purposelessness is precisely where the concept your Spinoziana studies may begin to wobble.

Meaninglessness concerns interpretation. It is about the absence of sense, coherence, or intelligibility. To say something is meaningless is to say that no concept or value makes it understandable. It is an epistemic void, a gap in understanding.

Purposelessness, on the other hand, concerns teleology. The absence of end, aim, or intention. To say existence is purposeless is to say it does not aim at anything. It’s not trying to get somewhere. This is an ontological statement, not an epistemic one.

We often tend to collapse the two. When we say “it’s all meaningless,” we mix both claims, one, that reality lacks purpose (which is Spinozistic that nature isn’t aiming at an external goal), and that therefore it lacks meaning (which doesn’t follow, because understanding can still find structure, intelligibility, necessity).

Spinoza’s universe has no purpose, but it is full of meaning in the structural sense. Everything can be understood through its cause; every organism or body expresses the divine substance necessarily. Understanding that necessity is meaning is what he calls the third kind of knowledge.

Such nihilistic turn confuses absence of divine will with absence of order. We say “no purpose” and think “no significance.” Spinoza hears “no purpose” and thinks “perfect coherence.”

When we say “because there’s no meaning, nothing matters,” it reveals a trace of resentment, the wish that there should be purpose, and when it isn’t found, we conclude futility. Spinoza would call that a passive affect, an imaginative reaction to the loss of anthropocentric teleology.