On Angst

(A lengthy youtube comment from seven months ago.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBAhnxmU7o4 )

Are the existential ‘problems’ rightly understood as Wittgensteinian pseudoproblems?

There is meaning in the world. At least, there is purpose in the world. Biology would be incomprehensible without recognizing purpose. So we can dismiss claims that the world is meaningless or that it is without purpose simpliciter.

This being so obvious, an angsty existentialist (forgive the portrait please!) must resort to linguistic qualifications by saying things like ‘there is no ultimate purpose’. But we should ask our angsty friend what she, he, or it, means by ‘ultimate’ and, crucially, what function that word plays in our language games?

Our angsty friend will likely find that he can find no language games that arise out of our normal forms of life. It is useful to speak in terms of (say) economic purposes, or linguistic purposes, or biological purposes. Such talk is meaningful because such talk is itself purposeful in addressing different aspects of life in the world. It is in the utility of such speech that the speech has meaning.Meaningful speech is, to Wittgenstein, speech that serves a purpose.

Here we must recognize that if someone is seeking angst, one cab employ the phrases like ‘ultimate purpose’ as a quasi-entity, for the purpose of denying this entity’s existence and so finding a cause for lament. But this does not mean the phrase ‘ultimate purpose’, as used by the angsty existentialist, has any ontological or moral significance outside if the contrived purpose of seeking angst, in which case we can speak of the phrase’s psychological significance, but it can be doubted whether this significance is healthy. If people are reifying phrases like ‘ultimate purpose’ for the purpose of anxiety, this is perverse. If people are reifying such phrases because the vagaries of grammar led their metaphysics astray into thinking it is something to be denied on metaphysical grounds, and that the angst is an unsought byproduct, then recognizing that language of ‘ultimate purpose’ (and the like) is, actually, intellectual non-sense, then the angst can be of, and future intellectual effort redirected.

If, on the other hand, our angst existentialist insists that phrases like ‘ultimate purpose’, as she, he or it uses them, has intellectual coherence that entail ontological and moral significance, (and note that their use of such terns tacitly presumes such coherence, for such coherence is a prerequisite to arguing for such significance), then I invite her, him, or it, to expound on the meaning of the phrase ‘ultimate purpose’ in a way that lets engage their implicit argument.

For their implicit argument is, by an large, to a moral and/or psychological (or, as they might calk their malange of the two, ‘existential’) crises. I ask: whence the crises?

If by no ‘ultimate purpose’ one means simply that one believes (for sound scientific reasons) that, come the heat death of the universe, purposeful activity will have ceased (the word ‘ultimate’ meaning ultimate (final) in a temporal sense), then I might agree. But that does not mean there is no actual purpose now. I don’t despair of talk of purpose, even with regard to my life, just because of that bare fact.

The angst in the conclusions drawn suggests to me that the term ‘ultimate’ is carrying more weight than the bare fact of heat death. Why is heat death in the future a cause of exisential angst? Is this angst the result of making the long term future of the universe a psychological idol, and the angst a result of the idol being threatened? If so, then such existential crises is interesting as a form of psycholgical pathology. It is of psychological and medical interest. But not of philosophical interest.

If, however, a communicable case can be made that this heat death constitutes a foundation for a current crises [what sort of crises? existential crises. what is _that? ], then lets hear it. It might be philosophically interesting. Or if such crises properly follows some less remote scientifically grounded premise (e.g. that you will someday die), then lets here that.

I suspect that the what makes these things actually problematic to people is nor that they constitute a genuine philosophical problem. I suspect that they constitute a heart problem arising from disordered attachments of the heart. If so, the phenomena remain interedtimg, just not phiisophically interesting (outside of perhaps the applied field of philosophical anthropology. )

Any pushback from thoughtful existentialists would be welcome. Philosophically speaking, are existential problems what Wittgenstein would call pseudo-problems (at the level of theory, for they may still be psychologically problematic for the disordered), problems which on the philosophical level are not to be dis-solved, perhaps dissolved into tractable problems for special sciences like psychology? Or are the problems genuinely philosophical in a way not merely ‘dissolvable’ my Wittgenstenian language analysis? Cheers!