Exploration
is our duty. Inside each of us is the astronomer staring up at the sky, pondering if celestial beings lay above. Inside each of us is the man on the frontier, slogging his wagon on its rusty axle across swamp and mountain, through sleet and desert. In the common day, these men are relics of the past, antiquities of an age where men were not satisfied with the state of What Is but thrived on exploring What Isn’t known, What Isn’t found, and What Isn’t understood. We find meaning in transforming What Isn’t into What Is.
The world is endless, vast, and complex. There is seemingly no end in sight and for all our posturing, we know so very little. Humanity, restless and ambitious, was never meant to be idle. Yet humanity was also not meant to stumble around blindly in the dark of the universe, searching for something to place purpose into. Mankind was given a tool, that of cognition and rationality, to help sort the sound from the false. To find meaning, it is this tool we must make use of. A meaningful life then, is not found in wealth or survival alone, but in exploration that gathers diverse experiences, and in reason that organizes those experiences into patterns—imposing coherence on chaos and transforming subjective fragments into a purposeful whole. In this essay, I will argue that meaning is found through reason and reason is found through exploration.
A life without meaning is pitiful.
“What is worth wanting?” Yale Professor Miroslav Volf asks in his book Life Worth Living. Implicit in Volf’s question is the statement that somethings are—worth wanting. He asks not “is anything worth wanting,” but “What is” (Volf 12). Obvious, elementary, but important. Meaning—the thing worth wanting, is something we all desire—and without it, life is pointless and plain. We owe ourselves a meaningful life, however it exhibits itself. How to determine and find this meaning, then, is the struggle.
Meaning cannot be manufactured, nor imposed. It can manifest itself in different ways: 6th century philosopher Boethius found meaning in God, and sin itself in the trivial “pleasures” of worldly life—things others would see as success. Not all of us are spiritual and not all of us need reject pleasure. Yet we must consider if in the pursuit of monetary gain we are striving to live or simply preventing our fall. To mistake possessions for purpose is like taking the derivative of a massive linear function: it appears grand and powerful, spiraling towards infinity at first, but under the surface it is flat and empty. The fallacy that a wealthy life is meaningful is just one example. A good life requires that somewhere in our exploration we find something truly worthy of our time.
Reason drives meaning
Reason transforms existence into meaning. Philosophers have attempted to apply meaning to reality for centuries. Most have failed. In their ivory tower, their intellectual safe havens, they forget a simple truth: reason cannot be bestowed upon one—they must find it for themselves. When Leibniz, Descartes, and Spinoza used rationality to construct their universes, when Kant used reason to guide morality, they seemingly fell into their own trap. In the process of using reason to universalize their beliefs, they stripped reason of its roots—experience. They built cathedrals in the air, lofty systems without the grounding of lived life.
Theirs is a noble pursuit, a pursuit I particularly admire. But for progress, it must be modified—the system irrevocably changed, the logic solidly shifted. To insist on the veracity of the Kantian, or the Spinozan framework of existence is certainly inspirational, but it is wrong, and downright harmful to the self. They sought to universalize reason, unbeknownst to the fact that reason can only be found through the self. As Ralph Waldo Emerson believed, ideas, and books, are brainteasers for the real action—making sense of existence for one’s self (Emerson 47).
Reason is personal. If it wasn’t, society would get along much better. It organizes our fragmented existence and experience, allowing us to gain subjective objectivity. Subjective in the sense that it is solely ours yet objective in the sense that it can truly dictate our lives—reasoned principles allow us to discover a life of meaning. What Descartes called “clear and distinct ideas” do not descend from heaven as he thought; they are earned by the slow gathering of experience, by exploration into the unknown.
Reason emerges from exploration.
Exploration supplies the fuel to the fire of reason. Therefore reason must be intrinsically linked with exploration. While the objective emerges out of the subjective, the subjective is nothing if it is not expanded whenever given the chance. And to explore, one cannot simply choose to dabble here, spend some time there. One must fully devote themselves to the process of discovery in order to progress forward. Likewise, one knows not where to begin, nor when to stop. One must rely on the principle of emergence.
The sum is greater than the parts
At a certain level of complexity, the brain develops consciousness. Developed, not made, consciousness emerges from the neural matrix like a wetness emerges from water. H2O, by itself, does not have the property of “wetness.” Only when 1.7 * 10^21 of them are together, a new quality emerges—an attribute that none of the individual molecules contain by themselves. A single star is not a constellation, but placed alongside its neighbors, it forms Orion, Ursa Major, the Pleiades. Meaning, too, is emergent.
Life, itself, then is the symphony, whereas exploration provides the musical fragments, the bass, the alto, the tenor. The vibrations—shards of experience. Reason conducts. It arranges them into melody, discovers the hidden structure, and draws coordination from chaos. Yet, in the pursuit of something new, one must venture into unknown territory. The composer learns from the book, yet adds a note here and a pause there. There can be no music without notes, no constellation without stars, no meaning without exploration. The man who never wanders into the unknown will never return with fragments to arrange.
Exploration is our Duty
Exploration can occur in many different ways. Some may venture the wilds, some engross themselves in music, others in architecture. I enjoy exploring ideas most of all—what I see as the purest form of self-expression. For example, the principle of emergence was something I found while sifting through a digital philosophy encyclopedia. It’s certainly guided this essay—just a small example of how exploration leads to innovation and circles back to meaning. But regardless of what it is, exploration is not a luxury, or pastime we do when we feel overwhelmed or bored. Venturing outside of our known is a responsibility. Our responsibility. We owe ourselves a meaningful life. Our time on this planet is short: it is not meant to be spent wandering around aimlessly, going through the actions but not remembering why. We must take advantage of the moment, grasp the present, and with it fill our experience like floodwater breaking from a dam. Exploration is the current dragging us out of the rut we often place ourselves in: without it, life collapses into monotony. To explore is to live, to reason is to understand, and to understand is to derive meaning. If we confine ourselves to the same rat-races as our fathers and fathers before them did, we reduce life to mere repetition. With exploration, we are lifted above survival, into the undefined and unknown pursuit of living fully.