content: An Oldie but a goodie by Anon: "Freedom and what it means to be free" Part 1 Do you ever feel like nothing matters? Don't. There is one perennial existentialist question that philosophers all hinge modus operandi upon; In the absurdity of existence, does what I do matter? In order to answer that, you must have an understanding for what is and what isn't, and why it matters. This leads to the most basic axiom that a human being who is aware of his subjective experience is confronted with - "The axiom of empty set" which poses, "There is a set such that no set is a member of it" or in other words, there is nothing and there is something - and the human experience can only come to know something objective through his subjective experience. To know your mother exists is the experience of knowing your mother - the biological implication of knowing relies on the objective causal circumstance of your mother being knowable. It is only that you come to know objective reality as the experience of you that the axiom of empty set can mean anything at all, because the dichotomy of empty and non-empty objectivity is subjectively experienced. This is why the axiom of extensionality, which tells us that two sets are equal if and only if they have precisely the same members. Given any set A and any set B, if for every set X, X is a member of A if and only if X is a member of B, then A is equal to B. This shows us that there is an objective item that has its own nature in reality, asserting truth in an objective reality without the subjective knowing of that item to interfere. This axiom is the reason that biology, physics, and math are not in opposition to language, art, and music - there is a tacit understanding that there is the object and there is the experience of that object, and that they are separate. Jean Paul Sartre noted that coming to this truth - that humans are confronted with stark objective truth behind the eyes of subjective experience. This epiphany of realizing the truth of existence in the human experience is painful and horrifying, but necessary for realizing absolute human freedom. After all, Sartre said that coming to know objective truth is a type of "being" that is categorically human in ways that "being" is not, referring to your experience of objective truth without a conscious experience of "what is" despite yourself. In this sense, Sartre gives meaning to action by attributing only an imposition of action to achieving the former kind of knowing - the knowing that gives you access to freedom, but also bears the horror and anxiety of a truth without God or order. It is the subjective experience itself that offers freedom - the experience of objective truth is horrifying and it must be uncomfortable and horrifying if it were to mean anything. He disregards the atheist philosophers of nihilism and cynicism that claim existence in an absurd world with no divine force or order, is a valueless, needless, and non-urgent prospect. To Sartre, freedom is the ultimate good - the human is assigned a human biological nature that is aligned with freedom - he can will thoughts, actions, assertions, beliefs, and through his speculations he can deny the freedom of others; "Hell is other people", his famous line references a humanity where the truth of absurdist existence and the consequent ultimate freedom of the individual is not yet achieved, and so to be an individual among individuals is to be an individual who experiences his life without the objective truth, and with the projected subjective experiences of others. It is all a soup of subjectivity until truth is borne upon the individual - the horrifying and uncomfortable experience of coming to know that existence is absurd and unordered is the only subjective experience a conscious human being is capable of that is contingent on the truth of objective reality. And when he is upon that truth, he is free of the subjectivity that impresses upon him - the wanton flashes of thought that you hear yourself speak in your head when you spend alone in a room that are just mimicries of the larger voices that your impulsive emotions latch on to in your humanness. In other words, actions matter. Actions matter when existence seemingly does not matter, because they are the only way to get existence to matter. They are the only way to truth. They are to the human experience as whiskers of a dog are to sensing himself for balancing. Actions, for a human being, are the proof that the individual experiences meaning in absurd existence - after all, the cynic and nihilist can exist without any attributions of himself unto meaning or value, but only the individual who has the 'belief' of meaning of himself, can assert the 'belief' of meaning in action. One cannot impel himself to believe, because a belief either is or isn't. In that the individual cannot will himself to genuine belief, genuine belief is a quality of the mind that is still acquired by action. Coming to know truth is experiencing truth insofar as he has the free will to consider himself, as an individual, in the absurdity of reality, and to acknowledge what his freedom (his free will to act) means after that exposition. One cannot approach the objective truth of absurd reality, experience the discomfort and horror, and achieve the understanding of freedom - the individual is only human, and that understanding of freedom must be acquired the same way genuine belief of any objective reality is acquired - through an act of coming to know. You force someone to find existence meaningful, it must be 'experienced'. In the same way that you cannot force someone to know the pleasure of music, it is only a thing to be understood as a human being with dopamine and serotonin and understanding of the lyrics of a song and their attribution. The human being relies on willed actions in order for a subjective experience to make any sense of objective reality - to be human is to act. If being human (existing) has any value or meaning at all, it is in the human nature (his ability to make sense of the world in subjective experience) - and the ultimate sense of the world is in its absurdity, which casts a reflection on the individual himself - he cannot help but see his place in the world differently now that he knows this objective truth. The human being is a math equation - he is a function of reality because he cannot know objective reality any other way - he is stuck in his biology and must rely on his organic eyes to tell him that things really exist and are not just spectres of malfunctioning humanness. He navigates the world with science, and the axioms that prove science ultimate end up at the unlikely conference of experience and truth. Edit: Continued In Part 2 in the comments