Richard Dawkins, biologist, author and atheist.[/caption]Who has not quested and pondered on the meaning of life?
My own misguided, adolescent quest for the meaning of life led me to the ashram of a yogi, the sermons of J. Krishnamurti, the glib utterances of the charlatan Osho Rajneesh, a university course in Shada Darshana (the Six Schools of Indian Philosophy), and the popular works of Bertrand Russell and other Western thinkers.
One of these thinkers was an eccentric Austrian named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had become a cult figure by the time he died in Cambridge, England at the age of 62 in 1951.
When Wittgenstein first came to Cambridge in 1911 to study the foundations of mathematics with Russell, his lordship could not decide if Wittgenstein was a crank or a genius but eventually settled for the latter.
In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge for a Ph D, occasioning the economist Keynes’ letter to his wife in which he noted: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logical positivism inspired a group of thinkers called the Vienna Circle. Its central tenet was distilled in the aphorism “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification.”
According to this "method of verification", a sentence had to satisfy one of the following conditions to be valid:
1. True by definition. “A triangle has three sides.”
2. Empirically verifiable: “Mt. Everest is taller than Mt. Druit.”
Conversely, the following sentences are not valid as they are neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable:
1. A thing of beauty is a joy forever
2. Jesus was born of immaculate conception
3. God is great
4. In my End is my Beginning
Logical positivism had a grand ambition: To smash metaphysics and, with it, all the “ultimate” questions. It ran into a familiar epistemological hurdle: itself.
By the yardstick of logical positivism itself, the sentence “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification” is a nonsense. Perhaps, this is why, despite Wittgenstein’s modest belief that he had solved all philosophical problems by analysing language, we keep asking the ultimate questions.
Fast forward to 2012 and an epiphany of sorts!
A recent ABC TV’s Q & A panel discussion pitted Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, against the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins.
At one point, Dawkins, arguing that life has no meaning beyond itself, said that just because you can ask a question does not mean it is a valid question.
“What is the color of jealousy?” is one such invalid question, according to the renowned biologist and author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.
Dawkins’ argument resonated deeply with me. I wish I had come across such an insight during my adolescent meanderings. Then, perchance, if not abandon my futile search for the miraculous, I might at least not have given up the study of calculus in favor of canard.
No comments:
Post a Comment