Sometimes, usually late at night, after having devoted an inordinate amount of time to figuring out some arcane and indecipherable philosophical theorem, I ask, “Why torture myself? Why not simply accept uncertainty and live out my days happily, secure in the knowledge that what is, is, and what shall be, shall be?”
Why bother with philosophy?
Recently, an answer to that question emerged. As mentioned previously here, for some weeks I have been muddling through Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. Having just finished the lengthy section on Medieval Scholasticism, I considered myself not much the wiser for it. On the contrary, I felt disheartened and depressed.
That night, however, a list of conditions that I consider foundational to my own philosophy took shape, one after the other, in my mind. Even as I tapped them into my mobile – which I keep handy on the night table for recording thoughts – I realized these fundamentals were in response to my reading of the Medieval scholars… that they are part of my attempt to make sense of what my intellectual forebears had to say.
Here are the foundational statements to my own metaphysics:
- Substance is neither created nor destroyed.
- Change is incessant and never ending
- All change is transformation of one substance into another
- There are three fundamental substances: energy, matter & spirit.
- Nothing exists that is not composed of the three fundamental substances.
- The three fundamental substances never exist in isolation from one another.
- The purpose of Being is Being.
- The purpose of existence is existence.
- The purpose of change is change
- The nature of spirit is Being.
- The nature of matter is existence.
- The nature of energy is change.
- Entropy is countered by Being
- Being is threatened by entropy.
- Nothing cannot exist.
- This moment has been possible for all eternity.
- All future moments are possible in this instant.
- I can imagine that which does not exist; I cannot imagine that which is impossible.
- What I imagine does exist.
- I can only know what exists in imagination.
Not everyone will agree with that starting point. Perhaps no-one other than I will. And I may have to revise its terms as I go. But for this existentialist, at this moment, every one of those statements is true, none of them are conditional or contingent.