“The Fundamental Question”
Arthur Witherall
To be awed or not to be awed? That is the question. And, as always, “I” am down in my hole, fractured and fragmented.
It seems rather certain the “I” that I have come to embody here and now will tumble over into the abyss that is nothingness before there is an answer to this question able to tackle it once and for all.
So, for all practical purposes, it might just as well all be meaningless. Only I have managed to think myself into believing that the answer to the question “why is there something – this something – instead of nothing at all?” – is somehow linked to the answer to the question, “what happens after ‘I’ die”?
It’s just a teeny tiny sliver of hope but, in the interim, what else is there? In other words, unless and until others can convince me of another possibility. God or otherwise.
That is clearly “what is at stake” here. For all of us eventually. And this is merely how “I” – existentially – have come to “interpret the problem” as dasein.
Ever and always assuming that, sure,“I” am going about it all wrong. Then back to what others are actually able to demonstrate to me as a more reasonable, more hopeful frame of mind.
So, “what on earth” does that mean? It’s a typical “general description” of the problem that, on the other hand, all serious philosophers come too, probe more or less “daringly” over the course of their own lives, die, and then punt it on to the next generation of more or less didactic scholars.
But don’t get me wrong: What else is there?
Until science, using its own methods, is able to offer up more substantive evidence one way or another, philosophers are left basically to explore it all “metaphysically” in a world of words.