This one's dedicated to Ren and The Philosopher's House in Johnson City, TN.
“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless.”
―
If life is meaningless, then magick is meaningless.
Albert Camus was a French philosopher who resolved that life is fundamentally meaningless despite humanity's capacity to create meaning. Camus argues that some questions are unanswerable in life such as, "Is God real?" "Am I an illusion?" "Is there an afterlife?" He also observes an indifference about the universe in the face of our human condition and coins this paradox the "Absurd."
Camus thinks of meaninglessness as a canvas for creation. The lack of preexisting meaning prior to human civilization may be depressing and induce feelings of suicidal ideation, but Camus urges us to take up our opportunity to be creators or, as Jangled Jester prefers to put it, magickians.
Magick, as taught by Jangled Jester, is the connection between structures of existence and processes of interaction. Interaction may be understood as the essence of spirit. As existence develops its form, it somehow obtains transformative quality, bearing evidence of the existence of novel design and development.
Albert Camus didn't reason that the larger landscapes of nature have a capacity to make meaning like people do. Regardless, he insists on measuring and testing our ability to conceptualize and make meaning or capture magick. The emergence of conceptualization itself is a creative, magickal act. Dr. Rute Costa and Dr. Raquel Amaro published in MDPI that meaning is based on the representation of concepts. What does it mean to conceptualize?
The perception of stimuli via our senses, which are selectively stored in memory. These memories, together with language, problem-solving skills, and an understanding of how the world works, produce concepts that assist us in categorizing and making sense of the environment. Concepts are mental representations of categories with similar features that help us recognize, organize, and interpret information.
Magick is meaningless in retrospect but can be a useful concept to meaning-crafting people. Magick is a concept for transformance (transformation and performance). Maybe there's no fundamental purpose about the ability of an atom to emerge into chatty dolphins or a space adventure, but the fact is in the matter, or as scientists and engineers put it, "proof of work."
Jangled Jester's agnostic, physicalist take on magick emphasizes core principles of design, structure, form, and shape with essence, process, formulae, and spirit. These principles are modeled through the meaning of human curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking in art and science. Art and STEM translate to people of all groups and walks of life, which is why Jangled Jester uses art and STEM to bridge connections with diverse populations. The blog's content is catered to agnostic enchantment which may be for a niche audience, but it's up to individuals to explore what they believe about the origins and far-fetched futures of magick and meaning. Camus argues against a desperate obsession with answering unanswerable questions and rebelliously remedies his existential nihilism with creative action.
“But art, because of the inherent freedom that is its very essence, as I have tried to explain, unites, wherever tyranny divides. So how could it be surprising that art is the chosen enemy of every kind of oppression? How could it be surprising that artists and intellectuals are the primary victims of modern tyrannies, whether they are right-wing or left-wing? Tyrants know that great works embody a force for emancipation that is only mysterious to those who do not worship art. Every great work of art makes humanity richer and more admirable, and that is its only secret. And even thousands of concentration camps and prison cells cannot obliterate this deeply moving testimony to dignity.”
― Albert Camus, Create Dangerously