22 [M4F] UK/United States: Let's Find the Meaning of Life together, in a Philosophical Romance

For me, the pursuit of Love seems always to be tied, inexorably to the pursuit of Philosophy. After all, what else could love be -- other than one of the most fundamental ways to understand another being?

We live in a world of beings. We are individuals, where every single one of us possesses a vibrant universe of subjective experience -- utterly meaningful, but yet completely isolated and on our own. After all, it is never possible to share the world exactly as it is experienced -- language is but a pale imitation of the subjective plenitudes of thought.

It was Rainer Maria Rilke who best described this realization. "We exist as solitudes" he seems to say. But yet the very project of love is an attempt to bridge this solitude -- to cross that chasm of convention and contingency, and aim for a meeting of beings and minds. "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

He qualifies the difficulty of the pursuit, and indeed, it never escaped him in his own life.

But we cannot be too harsh on Rilke. For really, are we doing any better? It seems to me, just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the un-examined love is not truly love. For what do we see in the sea of these posts, other than the same desperate longings for communion -- yet cast about blindly, without any thoughts to what love is?

I do not know what love is right now.

But I would like to find out.

Thus, I propose to you, a shared endeavour. Join me on a journey to find the meaning of life together, in a philosophical romance. It is philosophical: after all, it is philosophy's most original form to be conducted via the dialectic. The symposium and the peripatetic, that of conversations and walks. Of two minds conducting a single inquiry, two lives following a single path.

It will be our philosophical inquiry. One conducted through letters and poetry, at art museums and street-side cafes. And like any great novel, we shall begin it via an epistolary romance.

What are you waiting for?

Let us find the meaning of life together.