‘Who made you?’
quite obviously my parents begat me...
‘Do you have a purpose?’
yes...to live my life as fully as possible according to the skills and tendencies I possess...
‘What are you here for?’
see my first response...
‘What are you supposed to be doing?’
see my second response...
‘Where are you going?’
am I a clairvoyant...?
‘And don’t waste our time with any Sartre or Nietzche stuff.’
you consider the study of epistemology and existentialism a waste of time...?
I said to my husband, "Give me a coupla minutes to finish this up and then I'll make you a reuben sandwich."
Then I thought, "I can not make YOU a reuben sandwich and YOU can't give ME a coupla minutes." That's the way it goes,for contingent beings like ourselves...
- Yes, yes, you parents begat you. God bless them for it. They have endowed you with the whole panoply of what you may wish to call your "personality," for which you can never adequately repay them, thus being indebted to them for your whole life. The Confucists, as I understand it, consider this filial piety the root of all consciousness, all ethics and all society.
- They, your parents, are similarly and immeasurably indebted to all their ancestors through the whole chain of however-many, 100,000 (?) generations.
- You cannot know if a thing is "good" unless you know what is is for.
Is this a good pair of scissors? It's very poor for hammering in quarter-rounds. Useless for opening tuna cans. No good for pillowing your head while falling asleep. No good as a writing instrument. No good as a spouse. No good as a god. But it will cut paper and cloth: yes, it's a good pair of scissors.
Are you a good man?
- So you live your life as fully as possible? "Fully" is a term which also has no particular referent. What if you were a hermit? Would that be less than what you are now? Or more? What if you were a concert pianist? A sex-tourist? A cartoonist? A pit-bull enthusiast? A paraplegic? A pimp? A discalced Carmelite? Doesn't any of these choices largely exclude almost all the others? Or totally exclude 100,000 others? What can you possibly mean by a "full" life? Are you a good bonobo? Are you a good scissors? Are you a good man?
None of this is really answerable, I think, unless you know what a man is for.
- Epistomology and existentialism? That's what we're doing.
I already wasted a lot of time with Nietzsche and Sartre> They're about as good for my journey as Pauline Reage.