Between Human Imagination & Nihilism: Understanding the Imagination of the Meaning and Purpose of Life

Published by Kenneth Benelli

©Copyright 2022 Kenneth Benelli

Kenneth Benelli has asserted his right under the copyright, designs, and patents act, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the author.

ISBN# 979-8-9867130-1-4

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my sons Kyle and Kevin who went through their entire lives listening to my philosophical questionings; To my mom Mary, who showed me love to the end of her life; To my four sons Matthew, Isaac, Bryan, and Jonathan, may they have health, prosper, and contribute to this life greatly; And to Apple who was subject to my writing also in its final stages.

Table of Contents

Part I - The Human Condition

CHAPTER 1 - Life and Death

INTRO

1. Absurdity of Life

2. Suicide Not Exclusive

CHAPTER 2 - Unique Human Imagination

1. Memorials to the Dead

2. Thinking Creatures

3. Descartes’s Existence and the Soul

4. Physical Existence Without a Soul

CHAPTER 3 - Imagination Defined

1. Observing Imagination

2. Imagination’s Sphere

3. Sequence of Imagination

4. Synthesis of Hume’s Ideas

5. More than Imagination

CHAPTER 4 - The Brain and Thinking

1. What is Thinking?

2. Anthropology and Neuroscience: the Brain

3. Language in Human Creatures

PART II - Evolution of Certainty in Humanity

CHAPTER 5 - The Hierarchy of Beliefs

1. Contingency and Certainty.

2. Belief and Transcendent Reality

3. Certainty of Reason

4. Modern Age of Certainty

CHAPTER 6 - The Standard of Certainty

1. Changing Certainty

2. Standards of Judgment

CHAPTER 7 - Human Prophesy

1. The End of Humans on Earth

2. Entropy the Final Answer

3. Extinction the Final Answer

4. Eternity the Final Answer

PART III - The Symbolic Human and Immortality

CHAPTER 8 - Human Psychology

1. Psychological World

2. Psychology of Death

3. Humanistic Immortality

CHAPTER: 9 - Character Defenses of Symbolic Animals

1. What Becker Taught Us

2. Paradox of Immortality

3. Cultural Creations

Chapter 10 - Hope and Survival

1. Meaning and Hope

2. Illusive and Elusive Hope

3. Hope in All Humans

Chapter 11 - Faith and the Imagination

1. Degrees of Faith and Beliefs

2. The Leap of Faith

3. Kierkegaard’s Faith

4. The Leap of Reason

5. The Leap of the Will

6. Will to Power and Nietzsche’s Perspective

7. The Leap in the Human Condition

8. Conclusions of Imagination

9. Faith in Metaphysics and the Transcendent

10. The Dividing Line of Faith and Imagination

Part IV - Human Nihilism

CHAPTER: 12 - Philosophy and Concept of Nihilism

1. Philosophy of Nihilism

2. Concept of Nihilism

3. Nihilism Beginnings in Humans

4. Nihilism the Universal Questioning

5. Nihilism Universal in Humanity

6. Nihilism Death and Life

7. Is Nihilism Destructive?

8. Nihilism Death and Existence?

9. Nihilistic or Not

10. Nothing Does Not Exist

CHAPTER: 13 - The Source of Nihilism

1. Nihilism and the Meaning of Meaning

2. Beginning and End of Nihilism

3. When We Know the Meaning of Life

CHAPTER: 14 - Nihilism and Existence

1. Imaginations Exist

2. Nihilism and the Existence of My God

3. Nihilism as the End of Our Existence

CHAPTER: 15 - The Facts of Nihilism

1. Nihilism Fact or Fiction

2. Neutral Nihilism and Necessity

3. Nihilism to Blame?

4. What Nihilism Is Not

5. Nihilism Summary and Conclusion

CHAPTER: 16 - Is Life Worth Living?

Part V - Between Human Imagination and Nihilism

CHAPTER: 17 - Foundations of the Human Condition

1. Review of the Human Condition

2. Inescapable Imagination and Perspective

3. What is Reality?

CHAPTER: 18 - Imagination and Personal Reality

1. Over 100 Billion Imaginations (And counting!)

2. The Equalizer of Nihilism

4. Meaning OF Life vs. Meaning IN Life

CHAPTER: 19 - The Frozen Stability Concealing Nihilism

1. Thinking not Thinking

2. The Frozen Stability

3. Attunements in Reality

4. Response to Attunements

CHAPTER: 20 - The Myth of Survival

1. Humanity and Survival

2. Time is Life

3. Use of Time in Western Civilization

4. Activities from Children to Adults

5. Avoiding Nihilism

Part VI - Integrating Imagination and Reality

CHAPTER: 21 - Integration of Meaning in Reality

1. Faces of Personal Reality

2. Imagination and Emotions

3. Imagination and Desire

4. Meaning Created by Investment

CHAPTER: 22 - Integrating Imagination through Science

1. Imagination in Science

2. Theory and Falsification

CHAPTER: 23 - Integrating with Invention and Interaction

1. Games Become Reality

2. Elevated Games

CHAPTER: 24 - Transference of Imagination

1. Simulation of Reality

2. Simulation of God and Sex

3. Simulation of Symbols and Signs

4. Beware of Simulation

CHAPTER: 25 - Integrating the Reality of Consequences

1. Imaginations and Consequences

CHAPTER: 26 - Integration Summary Conclusion

Part VII - Conclusions of Imagination

CHAPTER: 27 - Overcoming Life and Death

1. Reviewing Our Discourse

2. Creating Our Imaginations

3. To Be Human

CHAPTER: 28 - What is Life?

1. Who Am I?

2. Life IN Reality

CHAPTER: 29 - The Final Choices in Life??

Notes

Bibliography

COVER PHOTO CREDITS

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PREFACE

Being born to an Italian father and a mother from Spain (both first-generation Americans), I followed the Catholic traditions.

As a result, I experienced all the dogmatic rituals of baptism, confirmation, confession, and communion with many of my relatives, who were also Catholics.

I slowly began rejecting those ecclesiastic requirements and restrictions in my late teens. Instead, I began searching for God more personally without any church structure.

I ended up being a part of the Jesus Movement in the 70s and was born again as part of my lifelong search for the Meaning of Life. 1

After this experience, I believed that I was chosen by God with a Destiny to follow and an Eternity to enter at the end of Life.

That conviction of belief led me to study the Scriptures and religious writings intensely for years. I eventually went into the ministry and became a teacher, preacher, pastor, televangelist, and missionary worldwide.

While in the Philippine Islands as a missionary, I experienced the complete collapse of ALL my beliefs. This traumatic reversal left me in an abyss of nothingness. Gone was my Faith, Destiny, Eternity, and everything else in my Life including my ministry and marriage.

After years of being on a different path in Life, I once again returned to search out the Meaning of Life. I began at the beginning of all human knowledge in history, studying all Religions and religious thinking throughout the world from the beginning of recorded thought.

This quest led me to an intense meticulous study of Philosophy, Religion, History, Science, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, and other aspects of human understanding that I could find.

When I read the book by John McGowan 2 "The Brain and Belief," it led me to the writings of author Ernest Becker. Only in Becker did I find a comprehensive interdisciplinary concept of understanding the Human Condition.

I reached an answer – that had no answer. Humans were animal creatures with symbolic creations that created Meanings in and of Life to overcome the fear and inevitability of Death. But there was no Meaning of Life I could know with Absolute Universal Certainty.

I realized we simply invent solutions to our psychological problems that all humans face in the same way but through distinct cultural and social beliefs and Ideologies. I had reached the end of my search.

I didn’t find God or Religion. I didn’t find a specific Philosophy that had Truth beyond any others I had examined. And I indeed didn’t find existential answers in the Scientific analysis of Reality.

What I found was Nihilism – and our unique capacity to submerge it by an incredible power we call Imagination.

Rather than studying morals, ethics, or political forms of societies, I began to focus on what was universal in the Human Condition. As a result, I discovered what was common in all aspects of Life and experience.

It was Human Imagination.

Not in the sense of fantasies or metaphysical existences in Eternity, but here on earth in our everyday Reality.

I wrote down thoughts in a book to clarify my thinking. It was a catharsis and an experience that brought clarity to my understanding by trying to comprehend what I would write for myself.

Over time, the book evolved as my studies never ceased researching the latest knowledge in all areas of thinking, ranging from Scientific quantum theory to Postmodern philosophical propositions.

The difference in my writings is that I feel all humans can identify with my broad interpretation of Imagination since we all have similar experiences.

But because I fully understand how God and Religion can be Real in one’s Life, I have tried to confine any reactions that would simply be polemic against metaphysical beliefs. That conflict is in no way my intention. Immanuel Kant stated that he had to deny knowledge to make room for faith. And I tried to accomplish a similar result. 3

I genuinely believe that a God may exist. But I cannot believe that any one person, Religion, Philosophy, or Ideology, can ever reach any Certainty of who or what God is.

That would seem to make me a Nihilist. 4 But I don’t consider that as a simple description of my thinking.

That is because our very existence in any Reality opposes pure Nihilism. To not know any Meaning of Life is not the same as understanding that there could be a Meaning of Life that is unknowable to humans. And so, like all other humans in mortality, I find myself between Human Imagination and Nihilism.

There are so many books on the Philosophy of Nihilism. They begin by saying in some way that there is no value, significance, meaning, morality, or Truth.

But somehow, since they are unique individuals with some extraordinary power of insight, revelation, or discovery, they find a value, a significance, a meaning, a morality, or a Truth, as they see it. Thus, they eliminate the Nihilism they begin with.

Only in the recent book from author James Tartaglia (2016), "Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality," 5 did I see consistency from start to finish.

His views on Nihilism are that it is a fact that is not evaluative. Therefore, we cannot blame it as having any agency or cause of attitudes or responses, including evasions or the necessity to overcome. Instead, Nihilism references a justified fact that we cannot know any Meaning or Purpose of humans outside the human context. Therefore, no Final Context provides any knowable Meaning or Purpose of Life.

Although Tartaglia does propose a meaning in his transcendent hypothesis of consciousness, he does not try to define it as some knowable state of existence. 6

It is difficult not to acknowledge some transcendent possibility but even more challenging to presume to know what that transcendent Reality is.

On the other hand, there are Theologians like Augustine or philosophers like Descartes, Kant, and Kierkegaard, who reached the place of Nihilism but found an escape in the transcendent metaphysics of God. There were also those like Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal, Berkeley, Hegel, and more that reached metaphysical conclusions about God or unique transcendent philosophies after recognizing Nihilism. At least they thought they did.

Philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and even Heidegger, concluded philosophies and ideologies that offered humanistic solutions to Nihilism but were also metaphysical.

They saw it as something to overcome or find redemption in through a superior perspective of living but without God or supernatural beliefs. 7

And then there are those like Hume who reached Nihilism and concluded the solution was playing billiards, eating, and socializing with friends when there was no answer to his own Philosophy.

The atheist may counter my thinking by saying that if I don’t know any God exists, then there is no God. And the theistic religious individual may say that it is because I lost or lack faith that I do not know God.

Both, I feel, are wrong in their conclusions. To say that you have Absolute Certainty in God is to deny faith itself. And to have Absolute Certainty that God does not exist leaves no room for the uncertainty of human experience in Life.

Therefore, at the end of the book, I could express no path to follow; no morality or ethics; no highest goal or purpose; no transcendent alternative; and no One God or Belief to escape Nihilism; although I understand the necessity the human species has for all these choices.

I could not conclude any Life to have any more ultimate Meaning or relative Meaning in humanity except through Imagination. And Imagination is a choice. It is limited by what Heidegger called the thrownness into Being at a specific time and circumstance in the Cosmos. 8

As such, I realized our Imagination could never end for homo sapiens