ARCH-HORIZON OF THE GOAL
July 24, 2024

No matter how much knowledge one gains, no matter how many insights one has, no matter how many good principles one lands on for living, no matter how much has been studied or experienced—none of this can fully resolve the question, “What is my goal?” I mean the goal at the top of the goal hierarchy—that goal that will give the meaning of all the other meanings, that will justify one’s life to oneself eternally, that corresponds to the question, “What have I come here to do?”—the goal that will end the life sentence rightly and well.

Religions have descriptions of the ultimate end, and we can list them without trouble: moksha, enlightenment, salvation, sanctification, union with God, self-realization, self-transcendence, repair or redemption of the world, justice, end of suffering, ananda, beatitude, being, love, divinization. But these names only beg the question of what the event they name might be. For while we can clarify what these mean cognitively—we can produce definitions, reiterate the teleologies—the evental or existential correlate is something else entirely. The question “Is it happening?” does not go away; the issuance of this totality cannot be phrased.

People look to religion to help answer the question of Ultimate Concern; they seek words and concepts to bring it into focus; but the further one pursues the proposed solutions, the more one senses how little these articulations will really help. They are orientations, not ostentations; training wheels, not roads. And when one’s responsibility for one’s goal really weighs, really claims its stakes—when one gets past the general level of reception and teaching and the common idioms that frame it—these words and concepts and names become gradually emptier, tautological, almost vain. They even come to seem betrayers, ways of diverting and distracting one from oneself, ways of controlling and siphoning one’s life to an improper goal—no matter the high tones that praise it as universal.

One could name philosophy what happens after all the heard-about ends have lost their luster. When the onus of one’s form-of-life falls entirely upon oneself. When the rules must be invented in the absence of rules. When the goal must be posited out of an abyss of freedom—through so many suspicions that it is all artifice—alone. When every move in the goal’s direction magnifies the mystery of the goal-question even more. When you are left with unverifiable creations, the liminality of poems, of the personhood-poem…

Because philosophy, poetry, too, are just names, genres of discourse, and like the rest of cult and culture cannot help but be consumed, obliviated, in the originary fire, the dream and the swerve—in the arch-horizon of the unknown and unknowable highest goal, which only the valiant and vigilant heart, luminously dissatisfied, can feel its way toward, in gratitude and glory, of course.