In my mid-twenties I graduated from medical school and started work; at first as a doctor, then in research for a doctorate. These were years in which I experienced the power of that "alienation" so characteristic of modernity.
And, as always in "this life", fundamental problems to do with ultimate purpose and how my own life ought to be orientated; was mixed-up with the daily fatigue and of long working hours doing externally-dictated tasks - and the apparent gloomy prospect of "more of the same" for some decades to come.
I sought answers in philosophy; and engaged a lot of brooding on philosophical matters - a lot more brooding than reading.
What I mean is that I thought a lot about relatively very few concepts, sayings and phrases. These few stimuli came from philosophers with an "existential" orientation - perhaps especially the Germanic thinkers Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Thus I never read these authors widely, nor studied them in a scholarly or rigorous way; but was struck by a few sayings and aspects of (what I regarded as) biographical aspects; and this was mixed up with similarly selective bits of some German fictional work such as some of Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann.
In sum, I was working in the tradition of German Romanticism which I already knew (more thoroughly) from classical composers - especially Weber and Wagner.
I was (and long remained) a mainstream scientistic atheist; however both Wittgenstein and Heidegger seemed to reach their deepest bedrock in the yearning or hope for "a God" as the necessary pre-requisite for a life of meaning: a life of engagement with the world and other people, rather than this miserable situation of being stuck in the "nutshell" of my own thinking, and looking-out (Hamlet was another big factor in this!).
And this began a long period of thinking "about" God - and essentially this was God, not Jesus Christ. At any rate, I developed a half-fascination for monasticism - which was, again, something I thought-about a good deal more than I researched.
What is interesting and significant in retrospect was that I never thought seriously about God as creator because I never stopped regarding the universe as (obviously! - so it seemed) having arisen due to "phsyics".
Instead I was thinking of "God" as a potential provider of meaning in a universe that was going nowhere in particular.
I was seeking meaning in life, in a reality without purpose or direction: seeking a meaningful life and human society in a universe that was utterly "indifferent" to meaning.
Unsurprisingly; this led to a kind of rooted pessimism: an ultimate bleakness to my outlook; and an suspicion that the best hope for life was not to be aware of the bottom line.
I think this may have been the basis of my interest in "monasticism" which was combined with a similar fascination with Zen Buddhism - in both instances the idea I had was (something like) that the environment and discipline of a meditative and ascetic life might have been effective in providing a convincing-illusion (in effect a delusion) of meaning and engagement in a situation in which that meaning was encapsulated by the circumstance of meditation and monasticism.
It seemed (and I may have been right) that this fitted with the extreme gloom and near-despair that permeated Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The idea that a rigorous philosophy would ultimately reach bottom in a kind of palliative psychotherapy - perhaps on a societal scale.
Heidegger, in particular, seemed to be hoping that society would re-instate "a God" who would cure our modern malaise and alienation by reinstating a divine underpinning for life...
And having done so; would then "forget" that this had been manufactured; so that everybody would then live "as if" there was a God, and thereby become able to have a kind of purpose and contentment - even though the deepest philosophers or historians might know that the whole edifice of meaning had actually been constructed by Men and had no basis in ultimate-reality.
In sum: the best hope for me, for other people, for society in general; was a convincing and universal delusion of God as the "underwriter" of the best-possible human and societal life: one that might energize, direct and coordinate its members*.
I was more-or-less stuck in this picture of reality; and what kept me stuck was (I now believe, in retrospect) the elimination of metaphysics from philosophy - the elimination of awareness atht our ultimate and bottom line convictions are (and must be) assumptions; and were not (and cannot be) derived from experience or evidence.
Once I had realized that my picture of a physics-rooted universe was an assumption and not a "fact" - this was the key that eventually led to a rational and rigorous way out from this trap of desiring a life based on benign delusion.
Of course the miseries of life don't go away, and can still overwhelm; no matter what the metaphysical assumptions. But it is of immense value to know that the meaninglessness and ultimate (bottom line) sense of alienation and meaninglessness that pervade adult life in modernity, is a self-inflicted problem.
Since we are, ourselves and personally (albeit by passive, mostly unconscious, absorption of prevalent social mores) the cause of the problem; we ourselves can be the solution.
*This could be summarized as the belief that in a purposeless-meaningless physics-made universe, all purpose and meaning must be delusional. However our private and personal "subjective" delusions are too weak to convince and motivate us, since they are continually being contradicted by the people and circumstances around us. Therefore, the only sufficiently-effective delusion is a group-originated and group-reinforced delusion that can be experienced as external and "objective". Therefore our best "hope" is that such a dominating societal group-delusion may arise and persist, somehow.
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