Existentialism strikes me as a failed attempt to escape religion. It wants to get out of having everything pre-setup, but it can’t unstick itself from the feeling that everything ought to be set up. Let’s try out a postexistentialist point of view:
“Sure, the world is meaningless. But so what? Goals exist regardless of where they come from, same as anything else. And what’s this ‘moral obligation’ nonsense? Holding beliefs is just something people do naturally—try forbidding it and see how far you get. Why invent random morality?”
My real-life view you might call radical neopragmatism. The crucial question, in every situation, always, is what difference does it make? The idea of the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of the world is useless; it doesn’t make any difference. Why hold an opinion on it? This view is “radical” because it’s extreme, and “neo-” because it’s different from the old-fashioned philosophy called pragmatism.
updated 28 June 2000