EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON
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EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON
- I had written you a nice big response here, but my browser crashed and I couldn’t recover the message. As it is I am rather uninspired now, so I will give you the gist rather than the full thing.
- Most people who say that everything has a ‘reason’ mean more than that everything has a ‘cause’.
- They mean to embellish the notion of cause with a kind of immanent benevolence.
2(a) A Christian might call this ‘god’s will’, whereas others must simply echo Nietzsche’s iconic aphorism ‘what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger’. - Others simply mean with this phrase that everything has a ‘meaning’. And yet I offer the following counterargument. If an event can engender more than one response, then it will always underdetermine the meaning we give to it, and so we can not really speak of ‘immanent’ meaning unless…
3(a) …unless we declare the notion of ‘event’ to be a pseudo-concept, by which we mean that no two people experience the same event. In this case though, although we can say that each ‘event’ engenders only one response, one ‘meaning’ or ‘reason’ or whatever, we cannot really ground our original distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘cause’. - The tendency to anthropormophise cuts directly to the way we think about ourselves. I think that using causation as a mechanism for explanation will dissolve rather than explain our identity narratives. However perhaps this is the worst kind of hypocrisy, if this dissolution is predicated on a kind of reverse-anthropomorphisation which itself relies on a prior dualism. The line between explaining our humanity and dissolving it into pure material and behaviouristic processes is perhaps what we need the most to distinguish, and yet perhaps on principle this is what we can distinguish the least, as our whole project is on the wrong track…
Anyway this may sound cryptic, because I am trying to remember the original, which was frankly much better.
I hope this is food for thought, though. Everyone that has believed in immanent destiny, I fear, has almost certainly been wrong. I for one, have yet to fully understand the complexities in the above outline, as it seems, as is typical, that 9/10ths of the problem remain submerged beneath the surface…
Regards, 
James