The Search for Meaning

[Philosophy Now]

by Rick Lewis

https://philosophynow.org/issues/162/The_Search_for_Meaning

[iambiguous]

Of course, an elephant is still an elephant. And while the monks might be blind, others are not. They are able to set the blind monks straight. In fact, there is a ton of information we can accumulate about elephants. Facts that are true for all of us.

On the other hand, what if the discussion shifts to things like poaching or elephants in zoos and circuses or elephants forced to labor for human beings or elephants increasingly stressed by habitat loss.

What does it mean to, say, do the right thing here?

Back to whether or not, in regard to things we find meaningful, an important distinction must be made between meaning in the either/or world and meaning in the is/ought world.

Clearly more important to some than to others.

[Skepdick]

Of course, an elephant is still an elephant. And while the monks might be blind, others are not. They are able to set the blind monks straight. In fact, there is a ton of information we can accumulate about elephants. Facts that are true for all of us.

On the other hand, what if the discussion shifts to things like poaching or elephants in zoos and circuses or elephants forced to labor for human beings or elephants increasingly stressed by habitat loss.

What does it mean to, say, do the right thing here?

Back to whether or not, in regard to things we find meaningful, an important distinction must be made between meaning in the either/or world and meaning in the is/ought world.

Clearly more important to some than to others.

Everything you've said is true! But what does it mean?

[iambiguous]

Of course, an elephant is still an elephant. And while the monks might be blind, others are not. They are able to set the blind monks straight. In fact, there is a ton of information we can accumulate about elephants. Facts that are true for all of us.

On the other hand, what if the discussion shifts to things like poaching or elephants in zoos and circuses or elephants forced to labor for human beings or elephants increasingly stressed by habitat loss.

What does it mean to, say, do the right thing here?

Back to whether or not, in regard to things we find meaningful, an important distinction must be made between meaning in the either/or world and meaning in the is/ought world.

Clearly more important to some than to others.

Everything you've said is true! But what does any of it mean?

More to the point [mine] can philosophers tell us what these things ought to mean to anyone who wishes to be thought of as a rational human being? And for many that is the equivalent of being a virtuous human being.

Me? I'm still "fractured and fragmented" myself regarding meaning that pertains to value judgments. Who is inherently/necessarily right or wrong about elephants given the controversies above?

[Dubious]

Like the search for the Holy Grail, meaning is a myth never factored into the existence of anything or for anything born on planet earth. Meaning can be denoted as the superset or historical archive of every type of wishful thinking encountered by humans from day one. Subtract all that and the set is empty.

[Sculptor]

Like the search for the Holy Grail, meaning is a myth never factored into the existence of anything or for anything born on planet earth. Meaning can be denoted as the superset or historical archive of every type of wishful thinking encountered by humans from day one. Subtract all that and the set is empty.

What you say is meaningless.


Boom Boom

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” Victor Frankl

Meaning what though?

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” Hermann Hesse

On the other hand, does he still believev that now?

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.” Thomas Merton

I actually believed that once myself.

“When you can live forever what do you live for?” Stephenie Meyer

I'll think of something.

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.” Albert Camus

Sure, get back to us on this.

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson

I'll write one here: dasein.

[Dubious]

I'll write one here: dasein.

...causing it to be a purely ontological concept where Meaning can be anything which refers to Being without any of the limitless connotations of meaning being definitive, causing dasein, conceptually, to be a type of definition where meanings are gathered and collected as a function of itself generated by time and place.

Heidegger was a lousy writer who made it worse by being purposely abstruse. Dasein can refer to anything which exists, starting with the universe and all the Daseins which follow its creation.

Being non-specific, there are, I admit, other ways of thinking about it.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” Richard P. Feynman

Again, sure, if that works for you, take it with you all the way to the grave.

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.” Virginia Woolf

And, come on, get real...what are the odds that it is yours?

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” Ian McEwan

I may actually be unique though.

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.” Arundhati Roy

Still, we post them anyway.

“I do not forget any good deed done to me and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.” Viktor E. Frankl

Ah, so the Nazis are off the hook?

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.” Somerset Maugham

But even then, only "here and now".

[Veritas Aequitas]

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meaning

• Meaning:
  1. what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import:
  the three meanings of a word.
  
  2. the end, purpose, or significance of something:
  What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of this intrusion?
  
  3. Linguistics.
  the nonlinguistic cultural correlate, reference, or denotation of a linguistic form; expression.
  linguistic content ( expression ).

I believe meaning in this case refer to 2 above.

If we are to determine the "meaning" [theme] of a book, we need to analyze the words, the significant variables within the book to determine the primary and secondary meanings in relation to the title of the book.

The primary meaning of the book would be the most common words and related concepts that are most repeated directly and indirectly.

In the book of life, what is most basic and repeated in human activities and thoughts are the 4Fs, i.e. the will-to-live supported by Food, Fight, Flight, & Fuck plus breathe, drink, tribal, pain [sufferings] and pleasure and other dominant instincts, subject to inevitable mortality.

Thus the primary [universal] meaning for the individual is the expressing the will-to-live optimally within the above constraints and mortality.
Whatever other meanings within life is secondary [conditional to varying circumstances] to the primary meaning of life.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.” Edith Wharton

Me? She's long gone.

“Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?” K-Ske Hasegawa

Me? I'm doing the best I can here to remind you.

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.” Patricia Highsmith

The right ones anyway.

If you could hear other people’s thoughts, you’d overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random. And you wouldn’t know one from the other. It’d drive you insane. What’s true? What’s not? A million ideas, but what do they mean?” Jay Asher

What do you need them to mean?

“To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.” Bill Watterson

For example, if you're a cartoon character.

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.” Richard Dawkins

He wondered why this frame of mind always exasperated him. Though he still doesn't know.

[puto]

This article is denotation of the Latin words jus in bello and jus ad bellum.
Hayati, Z. “The Philosophy of War,” Philosophy Now, Issue 124, February/March 2018, pp. 6-9.
Having, just found this in back issues; I wish that I had this in my War, Peace, and Religion class. One article read that issue is fantastically informational. Thank-you, again, for the magazine and articles. This is a very condensed version, but well worth the read, as the authors said. Thank-you. Thank-you sir as you are very enlightening by articles.

[Impenitent]

poaching eggs is one thing but poaching elephants...

-Imp

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” Ernest Becker

That's me!
Right?

“Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

And if there isn't a Heaven?

“I think of you as a friend. I used to think "friend" was just another word... Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word's meaning.” Masashi Kishimoto

Next up: the great friendships here.

“Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.” Douglas Adams

Your own answer in particular.

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.” Olga Tokarczuk

Let's just hope that never happens here.

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.” Alan Watts

I challenge anyione here to sum it up better.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.” Elena Ferrante

On average?

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.” Olga Tokarczuk

See, I told you.

"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future." Oliver Sacks

Quite the opposite for some of us.

“When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” Viktor E. Frankl

Tell that to the Nazis?

“Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.” Patricia A. McKillip

Cue the clouds?

“Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, 'There is always a day of reckoning'.” Donald Van de Mark

On the other hand, who is doing the reckoning?