The Matterer Is What Matters
Colby Maxwell on Losing Faith and Finding Meaning
Love in Light of the Universe’s Heat Death
I lost my faith seven years ago in a silver Elantra parked in an overgrown gravel driveway. Truthfully, the process took a few years to complete, but that day stands out to me especially. I’d been secretly reading and listening to forbidden thinkers (Hitchens, obviously), and finally, I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t sure if I could force myself to believe the tenets of my faith anymore. I’d lost the ability to believe. What ensued was a cascade of realization. That each fundamental action I would take from that point on would be terrifyingly, horrifyingly, devoid of true meaning. I was inconsolable. Surely, I’d lose hope in life and cease to find motivation to live, right?
Seven years later, an actively deconverting Mormon friend asked me a question on the back patio of a rent-stabilized apartment. We’d been talking about rebuilding after blowing up what you had assumed to be the fundamental principles of how you lived.
“I don’t know if this is too personal a question, but what did you do? If there is no God, nothing matters. If it’s all matter, just things in the brain firing, why does it matter?”
I looked at my BYU grad friend and saw myself. I sympathized in a way that I think only someone who’s felt the pain of destroying the neural pathways they spent a childhood building can fully understand. It is genuinely painful and like turning a part of your mind into a ghost that you can visit but never be again. I also smiled. I would never claim to have the answers to life, but I was happy to provide him my personal framework for meaning. After an hour of talking, I saw a glimmer of a smile appear for him, too.
From Matter to Matter(ers)
What snappy one-liner did I tell him to assuage his fears that everything wasn’t meaningless, the universe wasn’t coldly indifferent, and that he did, in fact, have a divinely appointed cosmic purpose to motivate him when life seems hopeless? What did I say when he asked if there was meaning in the universe after a loss of faith? I told him what I’ve been telling myself for years now. There probably isn’t.
There probably isn’t. An objective meaning to the universe, that is. At least as far as I can tell. Seven years ago in my Elantra, this was the pill that I had to swallow, and from what I gather, a rather sticky pill. It isn’t satisfying, it doesn’t go down easy, and it doesn’t land anything actionable in your lap. So how do you build a scaffolding of belief in what seems like an abyss of nothingness? You ask the second part of the question. Nothing matters to the cold, dark objective universe, but does anything matter to you?
Now that I mention it, there are some things that matter to me. My wife. Vanilla ice cream. The memory of my childhood dog. But do these things matter? I force the question again. To whom? To the universe? Almost certainly not. To me? As a matter of fact, they mean everything. Objectively, even. The key to the puzzle of purpose isn’t finally finding the picture on the box. It’s the realization that there is no puzzle, just a paintbrush, and it’s been squarely placed in your hand.
Three months later, I found myself once again speaking to a different set of acquaintances on the topic of meaning and purpose. This group was religious, however. Conversation started after someone sent a viral YouTube debate between three prominent voices in the online philosophy space. An atheist, a spiritualist, and a Christian. After three hours of arguing, quotes, memes, and rhetorical slam dunks, I finally got it out of me:
“For anything to matter, there needs to be a matterer!”
Ahh, yes, I’d done it. I’d simplified my ideas into a witty one-liner. Even more, I felt it was pretty novel. I started to imagine how I could package my little idea and deliver it to the masses. I’d stumbled into something that everyone who dabbles in philosophy dreams of—saying something new.
You Matter
Today, I woke up to a message. A screenshot from my friends. It was an article from the Oxford Academic, titled “Nothing “Really” Matters, but That’s Not What Matters” by Sharon Street, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. I’d been beaten to the punch.
My pride at saying something new, anything new, hissed out of me like a popped balloon. Begrudgingly, I read further. To my dismay, she was brilliant and said things better than I ever could.
“Does anything really matter? The answer depends on what one means by “really.” If the question is whether anything really matters in Derek Parfit’s robustly attitude-independent sense, then I believe the answer is no, nothing really matters in that sense. Nothing matters, ultimately, independently of the attitudes of beings who take things to matter. To matter is to matter from the point of view of someone.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic
Her position seems to be similar to mine. While I was initially excited to think I was saying something novel, I found myself glad to at least be in good company with what I was saying. Does anything really matter? I’m not sure. What I can tell you is that things really matter to me. And my guess is that some things really matter to you.
Here’s a helpful distinction I’ve found when someone tries to force their lowly view of atoms on you: Do you really like ice cream or is it just a frozen dairy treat? It feels silly when you put it that way, comparing the material state of something with the reality of its purpose in your life. I find that stating the material reality of something doesn’t seem to take away from a good matterer.
How about another one with bigger stakes: Do you really love her, or is it just a chemical reaction in your brain? I accept both. In the face of meaninglessness, I take back some silly sense of objectivity, a term oft levied by the theists and deists among us, and use it as my own. I can’t make the universe value you. But I can say that purpose can be objectively real if I’ve decided that something gives me purpose. The answer to meaning and purpose is as real as the answer to the question of if I love my wife. Yes, I really do.
Some Caveats
As I’ve stated, my framework is not free from critique. One of the most valid, I think, is that your sense of meaning is predicated on your mental state. This is addressed in Street’s paper.
“The causal threat of ceasing to think things matter never goes away, and there’s a kind of vertigo involved in recognizing that value is there only as long as you think it is and that you could slip into a state in which you stop thinking there is.” —Sharon Street, Oxford Academic
My prescription here is the same as Street’s. I can provide mechanism for avoiding these states of mind. Namely, getting sleep, maintaining close relationships, and cultivating varied interests and pursuits.
Alternatively, aside from fixing one’s “mental state,” I believe there is a secondary point that is potentially more motivating: you matter to someone else. Unfortunately, I can’t ground the purpose for your existence in something divinely beyond us. But I can tell you that people matter to me, and you matter to some people. In true days of despair when our routines and mental tricks have failed us, we can take some comfort in the fact that someone, somewhere, probably loves us. And to them, in their world, you objectively matter a great deal.
Finding Meaning and Why It Matters
My goal here isn’t to challenge anyone’s existing frameworks for meaning. It’s to provide a framework that helped me scaffold my beliefs during a time that I found personally challenging in the hopes that someone else in the rare position of leaving a religion would have it.
During that period of my life, my beliefs and my relationships were coming apart at the seams. The bedrock for objective existence in any capacity was taken from me. I needed a genuine framework for consistent belief, if only to justify my own actions to myself. For many of us who enjoy philosophy as a hobby, we roll ideas between the fingers of our mind like a piece of pocket sand soon flicked away. I contend we must be willing to take seriously a mandate to help people and view these questions as essential for fulfilling life, not purely stimulating discussion.
In the face of a crisis of meaning, I don’t have the answer, but I have an answer. Nothing matters except from the point of view of someone. When confronted by the question “Does any of this really matter?” I take some comfort in the fact that I can respond with “To who? To me? Of course it really matters.” and then live a life that provides me the richest, fullest answer possible.
Bibliography
Street, S. (2017). Nothing “really” matters, but that’s not what matters. Does Anything Really Matter?, 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0006
Here is a remarkable article from one of our own Club members who has really put his finger on what's important. Yes, there may not be any cosmic meaning (though the cosmic jury is still out on this), but does this mean there is no meaning? Only if this depresses you to the point of dysfunction, and in that case the meaninglessness is mostly local (to you and not to the cosmos at large). In other words, depression does not follow logically from lack of cosmic meaning. The realization of meaning is a function of psychological health; and (to speak a bit pompously perhaps) it is our birthright as humans.
Perhaps though the problem not just about meaning vs meaningless, but (in a way) about subjective vs objective. If we admit that the matterer is what matters here, then perhaps we should pay attention to a corollary point -- the psychological (spiritual) state of the person involved. And, at least from a Socratic standpoint, what matters most is not just what we, in rash enthusiasm, merely take to be meaningful (like collecting trinkets at Macy's) but rather what is truly most important to us as human persons.
So maybe that's what self-knowledge is all about -- knowing what really makes us tick at the most fundamental level available to us, so that we can flourish ("live well"). That, I think, is WISDOM, and it's a matter of self-discovery (insight) and never just the conclusion of an argument. Though arguments can correct some errors (as we've already seen above here), they can also distract us by rationalizing our distance from the depth of our own authenticity. Our own logical virtuosity can enthrall us, so that the better we are at arguing, the greater the temptation of distraction and self-deception. Likewise, when we are not self-deceived, we are living in our own truth -- a matter that is subjectively accessible but objectively present, even when we do not see it. (And there we have an entire other discussion.)
I love this. I think sometimes we use an “objective reality” to invalidate the meanings we have constructed for ourselves. But practically speaking, we experience a ton of meaning or lack thereof throughout our lives, whether God or physics condones it. For anyone looking to deconstruct Christianity, I recommend Marcus Borg! He offers some really interesting ideas around how to craft a spirituality that doesn’t require us to abandon our intellectual values