The Search for Meaning

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning.

...only intelligent agents can intend: purpose and personality go together. Yet we have already seen that personhood is not enough by itself to generate ultimate meaning, since this is not the meaning of a private life or of a specific community, but of existence as a whole.

That's basically the point I raise here...

If you were born and raised in a Chinese village in 500 BC, or in a 10th century Viking community or in a 19th century Yanomami village or in a 20th century city in the Soviet Union or in a 21st century American city, how might your value judgments be different?

Now, some insist that is why there are so many deontologists and/or objectivists among us. In other words, the belief that, in utilizing the tools of philosophy, it is possible to take into account all of these varied historical and cultural "rules of behavior" and technically pin down the optimal deportment.

In theory. In reality, however, look around you at the world we live in. Red states, blue states, purple state. Countless conflicts erupting around "us" vs. "them" involving countless conflicting goods.

That rules out all contingent beings – all humans.

Contingency, along with chance and change, are embedded everywhere in human interactions. The Benjamin Button Syndrome. No one really knows with certainty how new relationships, new experiences and access to new information and knowledge might impact what we think, feel, intuit, say or do.

Imagine, for example, the world we live in today had Thomas Matthew Crooks been a better shot?

What is the meaning of the existence of the human race? Why is it here? Such questions imply a purpose enacted in the creation of the species itself. But obviously, the species did not create itself, nor did it ‘intend’ anything by appearing on the planet.

With each new startling revelation from cosmogonists, the mystery often gets and deeper and deeper. It's just that, with God, it's teleology all the way up or all the way down. Whereas, with one or another rendition of Pantheism, how exactly did the universe acquire meaning and purpose?

As for this...

Therefore, whatever ‘meanings’ the human species may invent to lend a sense of meaning to its existence can be no more than comfortable imaginings: either there was Someone who ‘meant’ something in generating the human race, or our genesis was purely accidental, and hence devoid of any ontologically-prior meaning. So answers to the question which depend solely on human beings are unavoidably inadequate.

Start here: Rummy's Rule. In particular the part that revolves around all of the things in the cosmos that we don't even know that we don't even know about.

For example: https://www.the-independent.com/space/n ... 0direction.

"A new study of 263 galaxies has provided fresh evidence to support a theory that our universe is the interior of a black hole. Using data from Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at Kansas State University in the US discovered that the majority of the galaxies were rotating in the same direction. The Independent, March 2025

Go ahead, fit yourself into this somewhere and get back to us.

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning.

Meaning as Unintelligible

Having analyzed the question to the point of understanding its implications, we were now in a position to make a better judgment about its legitimacy. We could ask, “Are we well-advised to ask ‘Is there a meaning for existence?’”

Me, I'll stick to the part where all one need do here is to believe their own assessment does in fact reflect the essential meaning of, what, one's life? the human condition? existence itself?

And is or is not the world awash in any number of social, political and economic contexts whereby the moral objectivists among us anchor their own dogmas to one or another rendition of "or else".

Now nothing we had derived so far from our conceptual analysis showed that the question was legitimate. The question might necessarily assume all the criteria we had derived for it – intelligibility, articulability, and so on, and even the existence of a Supreme Being – yet this goes not one step towards proving that the question is intelligible.

Same thing though. If you genuinely believe your own assessment is not only intelligible but reflects the most intelligible of all possible assessments then you will no doubt act on this conviction. And it is our actual behaviors that precipitate...consequences?

Perhaps there is no such meaning. Perhaps the people who pose the question simply fail to recognize the radical contingency of the universe, and the impossibility of meaning entailed by naturalism (i.e., the idea that there’s no supernatural being).

Contingencies indeed. But also chance and change. Contingency, chance and change. The Benjamin Button Syndrome. Then the gap and Rummy's Rule.

On the other hand, given the profound mysteries that suffuse both cosmology and cosmogony, we may never ever know why there exist something instead of nothing. And why this something and not something else.

Perhaps absolute-meaning seekers are caught up in a delusion, and cannot see that they are irrationally presupposing the cogency of their request, when no such meaning could possibly exist.

On the other hand, run this by them and you'll encounter any number of hopelessly conflicting assessments. Why? Because, given the psychology of objectivism, this all has far more to do with being able to anchor the Real Me to one or another One True Path...what that path might happen to be is rooted existentially in dasein.

We cannot rationally expect meaning to come from random collocations of hydrogen and helium, or quark-gluon plasma, or to ask what the Big Bang ‘intended’; thus any meaning attributed to existence must surely be an imposition after the fact.

In other words, whatever that means in conjunction with the life we live. Then the facts revolving around death itself.

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning.

If a meaning for existence is an unintelligible concept, then how are we to avoid despair?

Of course, for the overwhelming preponderance of men and women around the globe, meaning is anything but unintelligible. And they demonstrate this from day to day by acting on what they believe does reflect the most intelligible human interactions. In fact, many are adamant regarding their very own "meaning of life". It is said to be either the optimal or the only rational explanation for, well, everything?

One way is to heap scorn on the question, making an exhibition of our intellectual superiority. The risk here, of course, is that bright people will see through the ruse and call us to account for our certainty; and even those who do not see the bluff will feel personally insulted.

Again, not entirely sure what this means "for all practical purposes". Instead, I fall back on the assumptions I make regarding what I call the "psychology of objectivism". In other words, any number of people will embrace one or another essential meaning and/or morality because it allows them to anchor themselves to one or another transcending font. God or No God.

Or, we might claim that although we live in a purely naturalistic universe there is a meaning for existence – except that we don’t happen to know what it is. That might help us to avoid despair, but our listeners would surely wonder how we could possibly know about what we were simultaneously confessing not to know about.

In a sense, this reflects my own assumption that objective meaning and morality may well exist...just not for me "here and now".

Finally, pretending that the question doesn’t really matter is not terribly likely to work, for the question articulates one of the longest-standing concerns of humanity and has an august pedigree in philosophy. So what to do with it?

Well, there are the stoics and the cynics and the sophists and the epicureans and the hedonists and the narcissists and the sociopaths. And for any number of them there are no long-standing concerns of humanity. There is only dealing with the "human condition" so as to, above all, further their own self-interests.

[puto]

People you are looking for an 'objective truth', in opinions of others', and not your own adequacy of beliefs. Self-knowledge is never to re-asses a cognition once made. Justification amounts to knowledge, or it is mere opinion. Academically cannot be apprehended. Pyrrho answer to the 'normative question was not to hold 'opinions', and suspend 'judgment', the outcome will be tranquility (ataraxia.) Having, happiness is the meaning of life. We do not come to happiness through the hypothetical question, according to Pyrrho. Somehow is the 'theoretical' being rationally consistent, for action, which is subjective feeling (not understood.) Because emotion or external pressures, Pyrrho wants us to use reason to come to meaning, which is self-evident and not chance, and no further proof or justification. This is why I am a Sceptic, and try to apprehend concepts and ideas. But I am still investigating, in analytics and formal logic of concepts through analysis. "Don't worry just be happy," by Bobby McFerrin.

[Belinda]

People you are looking for an 'objective truth', in opinions of others', and not your own adequacy of beliefs. Self-knowledge is never to re-asses a cognition once made. Justification amounts to knowledge, or it is mere opinion. Academically cannot be apprehended. Pyrrho answer to the 'normative question was not to hold 'opinions', and suspend 'judgment', the outcome will be tranquility (ataraxia.) Having, happiness is the meaning of life. We do not come to happiness through the hypothetical question, according to Pyrrho. Somehow is the 'theoretical' being rationally consistent, for action, which is subjective feeling (not understood.) Because emotion or external pressures, Pyrrho wants us to use reason to come to meaning, which is self-evident and not chance, and no further proof or justification. This is why I am a Sceptic, and try to apprehend concepts and ideas. But I am still investigating, in analytics and formal logic of concepts through analysis. "Don't worry just be happy," by Bobby McFerrin.

Happiness depends on soul. Soul is strongest when conscience, led by reason and ordinary human sympathy, is active.

[Martin Peter Clarke]

I find meaning here, marginally, and diminishingly already. The signal to noise ratio is miniscule. I find it in my relationships, father-child, grandchild, friends, colleagues (I'd kill for my boss). People on the street. In nature. Plants. The river. Rats. Birds. Art. In reading Philosophy Now. Work. God I love work. I'm a church & hall caretaker. Walking. Dying. Love. Harry Bosch. Adrian Tchaikovsky. In strong atheism late in life. In infinite nature. In having someone to love. All in. Remotely. Gives me hot eyes this.

[iambiguous]

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning.

Conclusion

For those readers who still wish to ask, ‘Is there a meaning to existence?’, the upshot is this: we cannot even ask that question without granting that the answer must be rendered as an intelligible proposition of the sort that others can comprehend and discuss.

Then the part where these discussions break down when one person comprehends a proposition regarding, say, the morality of homosexuality that another person comprehends in an entirely conflicting way.

Up to a point, sure, there are particular facts about homosexuality that everyone can agree with. Why? Because they are, in fact, true for everyone. You can look the word up in a dictionary if you're not sure of what it means. But where do you go to get the optimal assessment of it morally and politically?

An answer that is claimed by one person but not intelligible to anyone else will not qualify as a meaning. Neither will an answer that, although intelligible to one ‘community of meaning’, fails to be intelligible in a more general discourse. In other words, it will not be enough to say, “The meaning of existence is different things,” because that fails to be a meaning of existence. The answer must be universal. Because of this, the meaning must also pre-exist the other things it applies to. And it must also account for the intention inherent in the concept of meaning.

Again, however, run this by any number of these folks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies

...pertaining to a particular moral conflagration and see where they take it when the "concept of meaning" comes down out of the philosophical clouds.

[Belinda]

People you are looking for an 'objective truth', in opinions of others', and not your own adequacy of beliefs. Self-knowledge is never to re-asses a cognition once made. Justification amounts to knowledge, or it is mere opinion. Academically cannot be apprehended. Pyrrho answer to the 'normative question was not to hold 'opinions', and suspend 'judgment', the outcome will be tranquility (ataraxia.) Having, happiness is the meaning of life. We do not come to happiness through the hypothetical question, according to Pyrrho. Somehow is the 'theoretical' being rationally consistent, for action, which is subjective feeling (not understood.) Because emotion or external pressures, Pyrrho wants us to use reason to come to meaning, which is self-evident and not chance, and no further proof or justification. This is why I am a Sceptic, and try to apprehend concepts and ideas. But I am still investigating, in analytics and formal logic of concepts through analysis. "Don't worry just be happy," by Bobby McFerrin.

Greek rationality is good, very good. May modern people also embrace the passion and creativity of Jehovah?

[Pistolero]

A definition of meaning is essential.
What does 'meaning' mean?
Does it mean purpose?
Then purpsoe is non-existence, because then man would not require a will.....
A purpsoe is a reference to an objective....a motive...intent - will.
We give ourselves purpsoe......on top of the original which is the perpetuation of life.


Meaning, on the other hand, must mean something more than purpose.
In my definition of 'meaning' it means how the perceptible inter-relates, interconnects, interacts...
Using my definition we can conclude that existence is full of emanating, even if it lacks purpose...a telos.

It is up to man to perceive meaning, and give himself a purpsoe that is attainable...not supernatural...not intentionally unattainable to excuse his failures.

[Belinda]

A definition of meaning is essential.
What does 'meaning' mean?
Does it mean purpose?
Then purpsoe is non-existence, because then man would not require a will.....
A purpsoe is a reference to an objective....a motive...intent - will.
We give ourselves purpsoe......on top of the original which is the perpetuation of life.


Meaning, on the other hand, must mean something more than purpose.
In my definition of 'meaning' it means how the perceptible inter-relates, interconnects, interacts...
Using my definition we can conclude that existence is full of emanating, even if it lacks purpose...a telos.

It is up to man to perceive meaning, and give himself a purpsoe that is attainable...not supernatural...not intentionally unattainable to excuse his failures.

I agree that 'meaning' is more than 'purpose'. The "inter-relates, interconnects, interacts..." you mention is what I have been calling 'system'.

Final cause (i.e. telos)pertains only to life forms. Inanimate beings lack telos: abstract ideas lack telos. So we agree here too..

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning.

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer… The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the meaning of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that meaning?)” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

On the other hand, once again, this basically revolves [for me] around meaning which can be communicated such that everyone readily understands it.

For example, what does it mean to submit posts here? Not the content of the post but the act of submitting it itself. Are we going to engage in heated arguments about it? Not likely unless you are afflicted with one or another "condition" thwarting your capacity to think rationally even in regard to the either/or world.

For all its apparent importance, the question of the meaning of life is most strange. For the vast majority of people outside academe, it is the defining concern of philosophy, the issue that provides philosophy’s raison d’etre.

Actually, for the vast majority of people, meaning revolves around raising a family or going to school or going to work and getting the bills paid. Or simply doing all of the things that must be done if you are to subsist [or even thrive] from day to day.

Academic philosophers should hesitate before dismissing this view with a smile of polite embarrassment, for there is surely a broad but defensible sense of the question in which all philosophy is, indeed, about nothing else.

Okay, what then has the philosophical community [academic or otherwise] concluded in regard to meaning and morality? For example, socially, politically and economically, are we or are we not demonstrably responsible for what we say and do?

The defensible sense is the conception of philosophy as an attempt to understand the human condition and our place in the universe – the attempt, in short, to answer the three questions that Kant believed to comprise all philosophy: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?

Just out of curiosity, how might Kant have reacted to 1] The Gap, 2] Rummy's Rule and/or 3] the Benjamin Button Syndrome? Instead, he falls back on God as the transcending font connecting everything to everything else.

But the fact is, this putatively definitive philosophical problem had rarely been addressed explicitly by any thinker before the nineteenth century, when Nietzsche and Kierkegaard made it their preoccupation. And although it would seem foolhardy or perverse to deny the importance of the question, exactly what is being asked and what might constitute a compelling answer have been notoriously elusive of clarification. In addition, the problem of the meaning of life seems to generate a multitude of paradoxes.

Here, it seems, we have the two paths taken by the existentialists to assess meaning [and morality]....God and No God. Kierkegaard takes a "leap of faith" to the Christian God while Nietzsche buried Him. But then the part where some say Nietzsche blinked and "thought up" the closest thing to God and religion...the Ubermensch and Eternal Recurrence.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning.

In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s poignant metaphor of spiritual crisis, Gogo asks Didi what will happen to them when Godot at last arrives. It soon becomes clear that neither has any idea, that the sole focus of their relentless hope is shrouded in utter obscurity.

Some see godot here as God. In other words, the human condition is not essentially meaningless and purposeless. We just have to wait patiently for a God, the God to reveal Himself and disclose "the meaning of it all". Others see godot as any explanation at all regarding The Meaning of Life. While others still see godot as the Grim Reaper...death: https://youtu.be/6W9PuLcoZMM?si=j1P58P0oOFcsSSW5

Are we not precisely in their condition whenever we wonder how our lives will be changed once the meaning of life is revealed?

More to the point [mine] what on Earth is to be done about it?

Actually, take your pick. In other words, there are hundreds and hundreds of sure-fire antidotes "out there". And all one needs to do then is to believe that the One True Path they are on really, really is the One True Path to, well, whatever one needs it to be, right?

The above quotation from Wittgenstein alerts us to a similar paradox. Having felt perhaps for years that his life is deprived of meaning, a person now feels the meaning restored. But when we inquire of him just what this newfound meaning is, he’s inevitably unable to say.

On the other hand, if the restoration allows someone to sustain a comforting and consoling frame of mind all the way to the grave, what difference does it make if what is believed is in fact actually false?

Here is a kind of knowledge or wisdom we are inclined to regard as of the utmost importance, and yet we may well be at a loss to say what difference it will make to our lives once we acquire it, and we will be unable to express the knowledge when we possess it. What other enduring philosophical problem is so scuttled in paradox and confusion?

And then we only have to go back to the existence of existence itself and "somehow" fit the human condition into it.

[Belinda]

Gogo and Didi are not existentialists .

The Holocaust was when hope died. However Sartre was fortunate in being able to be a freedom fighter.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning

Does human life have a meaning? If so, what is that meaning? How should I change my life to comport myself toward it?

Of course, the fanatics on their very own "my way or the highway" One True Path, will scoff at questions of that sort. The rest being, among other things, history. 

Right?

My purpose in this article will be to understand what these sentences mean. First, I will set out the difficulties we encounter in dealing with ‘the problem of life’. Then I will try to uncover the experiential source of these problems, in order to account for the difficulties in resolving them and in order to clarify their sense.

As though this will upend any of those "meaning objectivists" who declare [here and elsewhere] that they already embody the most rational and virtuous manner in which to understand the human condition. Many will then come at you with things like, "that's simple". Or, for some, "or else". After all, do we not live in a world where some speak of a problem in life that others actually embrace as a solution. 

No, instead, the main danger here lies in encountering those who do insist the meaning of life encompasses their own assessment of legal prescriptions and proscriptions, of, politically, the appropriate rewards and punishments. In other words, given their capacity to enforce their own dogmas.  

[Martin Peter Clarke]

People you are looking for an 'objective truth', in opinions of others', and not your own adequacy of beliefs. Self-knowledge is never to re-asses a cognition once made. Justification amounts to knowledge, or it is mere opinion. Academically cannot be apprehended. Pyrrho answer to the 'normative question was not to hold 'opinions', and suspend 'judgment', the outcome will be tranquility (ataraxia.) Having, happiness is the meaning of life. We do not come to happiness through the hypothetical question, according to Pyrrho. Somehow is the 'theoretical' being rationally consistent, for action, which is subjective feeling (not understood.) Because emotion or external pressures, Pyrrho wants us to use reason to come to meaning, which is self-evident and not chance, and no further proof or justification. This is why I am a Sceptic, and try to apprehend concepts and ideas. But I am still investigating, in analytics and formal logic of concepts through analysis. "Don't worry just be happy," by Bobby McFerrin.

Happiness depends on soul. Soul is strongest when conscience, led by reason and ordinary human sympathy, is active.

Happiness, meaning, depends on gratitude. Which is hard to remember in distraction.