Page 67 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
occasionally. In Ecclesiastes it states:
Then said I in my heart, `As it happeneth to
a fool, so it happeneth even to me, and why was
I more wise?... And how dieth the wise man: as the fool....Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?... Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.53
These are all very negative views of meaninglessness. Nietzsche and Thiele exhort us to “celebrate life in all its meaninglessness.” Maybe the word itself, meaninglessness, is so negative that to think of it in positive terms is too great a contradiction.
Existentialists call meaninglessness “the absurd.” They say absurdity results when the human drive
to find meaning runs into the inability to find any meaning that is absolute.54 Yet the word “absurd” may be worse than the word “meaninglessness” when it comes to being negative.
Yet as we shall see, Nietzsche sees the state of dwelling in meaninglessness as the most pure freedom possible. It’s the most pure because from that angle you and only you assign meaning. “Pure freedom” might be a good substitute for meaninglessness, but it’s not precise enough.
How about calling meaninglessness “pure potential.” That is the positive side of
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