The Search for Meaning

[Belinda]

Why? What's the point of exercising that negative disposition? I'm an optimistic pessimist as it is.

Surely if you vote Labour you are pessimistic enough to see that a lot needs to be changed.

Sure, hug trees and pray "to whom it may concern " to express gratitude, or even repeat "Blessed Day" , but only pessimists actually get stuff changed for the better.

Progress is dead except through economic growth. As always. What are you getting done? Labour will never address social inequality at source. It's politically impossible in democracy. I have enough going on in my little life to struggle to be stoical about. You?

I am religious regarding the ultimate value of hope(but not sentimentality or wishful thinking!).
To deprive someone of hope is one of the worst offences against human rights.

[Martin Peter Clarke]

Surely if you vote Labour you are pessimistic enough to see that a lot needs to be changed.

Sure, hug trees and pray "to whom it may concern " to express gratitude, or even repeat "Blessed Day" , but only pessimists actually get stuff changed for the better.

Progress is dead except through economic growth. As always. What are you getting done? Labour will never address social inequality at source. It's politically impossible in democracy. I have enough going on in my little life to struggle to be stoical about. You?

I am religious regarding the ultimate value of hope(but not sentimentality!).

That, I respect, unequivocably. I don't have to make any Rogerian effort to do so.

[Dubious]

A prerequisite to arrive at a tentative more realistic conclusion is to subtract god from the search.

[iambiguous]

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

But the fact that one may be content to stop the [infinite] regress at a certain point does nothing to undermine its destructive logical force.

And if you never reach that point? In regard to meaning and morality. And one person's "destructive logical force" may well be anything but that for others.

That a great many people have found deep consolation in the idea of an afterlife cannot be denied. That these same people were satisfied to stop their search for meaning there is also undeniable. But the question of the meaningfulness of the afterlife remains despite the fact that they are content not to raise it.

That's basically the modus operandi of any number of meaning/morality/metaphysical objectivists here. If being content -- comforted and consoled -- becomes the whole point of believing what you do, why rock the boat by, say, coming to places like this and dealing with "fractured and fragmented" philosophers like me? And who can deny that when it comes to value judgments of this sort merely believing what you do need be as far as it goes.

Perhaps it is not meaning they seek, but a kind of emotional fulfillment – the sense that the world is hospitable, or the assurance that they are loved. But the fact that they end their quest with the afterlife does not get us any closer to understanding what would make the afterlife meaningful.

That's my point as well regarding the particularly "arrogant, autocratic, authoritarian" sectarians among us. The afterlife becomes whatever they think and feel and intuit that it is. The details become moot once they believe they can acquire immortality and salvation simply by believing in one or another God or spiritual path. Given one or another rendition [for some] of "or else".

As we observe the characters in Waiting for Godot it occurs to us that the failure of Godot to appear might well be a blessing to them, for were Godot at last to come, they would be forced to confront the question of precisely in what sense they are saved. If we can establish meaningfulness only by being part of a larger framework, then once presented with any such scheme, we have no logical recourse but to embark on a search without end.

Here, in my view, it comes down to whether you construe godot as a waiting for meaning and purpose in life on this side of the grave, or as a waiting for God, or [as I think] as a waiting for death itself.

[Belinda]

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

But the fact that one may be content to stop the [infinite] regress at a certain point does nothing to undermine its destructive logical force.

And if you never reach that point? In regard to meaning and morality. And one person's "destructive logical force" may well be anything but that for others.

That a great many people have found deep consolation in the idea of an afterlife cannot be denied. That these same people were satisfied to stop their search for meaning there is also undeniable. But the question of the meaningfulness of the afterlife remains despite the fact that they are content not to raise it.

That's basically the modus operandi of any number of meaning/morality/metaphysical objectivists here. If being content -- comforted and consoled -- becomes the whole point of believing what you do, why rock the boat by, say, coming to places like this and dealing with "fractured and fragmented" philosophers like me? And who can deny that when it comes to value judgments of this sort merely believing what you do need be as far as it goes.

Perhaps it is not meaning they seek, but a kind of emotional fulfillment – the sense that the world is hospitable, or the assurance that they are loved. But the fact that they end their quest with the afterlife does not get us any closer to understanding what would make the afterlife meaningful.

That's my point as well regarding the particularly "arrogant, autocratic, authoritarian" sectarians among us. The afterlife becomes whatever they think and feel and intuit that it is. The details become moot once they believe they can acquire immortality and salvation simply by believing in one or another God or spiritual path. Given one or another rendition [for some] of "or else".

As we observe the characters in Waiting for Godot it occurs to us that the failure of Godot to appear might well be a blessing to them, for were Godot at last to come, they would be forced to confront the question of precisely in what sense they are saved. If we can establish meaningfulness only by being part of a larger framework, then once presented with any such scheme, we have no logical recourse but to embark on a search without end.

Here, in my view, it comes down to whether you construe godot as a waiting for meaning and purpose in life on this side of the grave, or as a waiting for God, or [as I think] as a waiting for death itself.

For existentialists there is no finality, for who one is, until the moment of death. God/Godot therefore is essence of one's existence. It follows that it's waste of one's time and one's life to wait for finality and essence. The only thing one can do concerning finality is proactively create what one wants essence to be.

[iambiguous]

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

If a larger schema does not logically end our quest, perhaps then, in asking the question of life, we are searching for the internal order of the whole, as we might do in trying to determine the meaning of a play, to borrow a thoughtful analogy from John Wisdom in The Meaning of Life, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ might, then, really mean, ‘What is the order in the drama of time?’ Is life a tragedy, or is it a comedy, or is it the sort of tragicomedy depicted in the works of Kafka and Beckett?

So, is anyone here convinced that philosophers will someday be able to encompass the meaning of life such that "somehow" meaning in the is/ought world will be deemed as objective as meaning in the either/or world?

I'm not saying that it won't happen. Let alone that it can't happen. And, of course, any number of truly hardcore moral objectivists among us will scoff at this uncertainty. After all, they have already connected the dots between meaning and morality such that there is no difference. At least not up in the philosophical clouds.

However there are also serious problems with this new candidate for the direction of our inquiry. Unlike this question of the meaning of the play, this question about life seems to be a request for a kind of knowledge. But what would it mean to know that human life is a comedy or a tragedy, or a random mixture of elements of both? And how would such knowledge be confirmed?

On the other hand, we still live in a world where many make little or no distinction between what they claim to know is true and what actually is true. In fact, some seem more intent on going after those who claim to know something else entirely.

As for whether the human condition is a comedy or a tragedy or a combination of both, that isn't the right question from my frame of mind. Instead, the more relevant question would seem to revolve around why some call particular experiences tragic while others see them as anything but. And those who laugh at things that others are devastated regarding.

[Belinda]

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

If a larger schema does not logically end our quest, perhaps then, in asking the question of life, we are searching for the internal order of the whole, as we might do in trying to determine the meaning of a play, to borrow a thoughtful analogy from John Wisdom in The Meaning of Life, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ might, then, really mean, ‘What is the order in the drama of time?’ Is life a tragedy, or is it a comedy, or is it the sort of tragicomedy depicted in the works of Kafka and Beckett?

So, is anyone here convinced that philosophers will someday be able to encompass the meaning of life such that "somehow" meaning in the is/ought world will be deemed as objective as meaning in the either/or world?

I'm not saying that it won't happen. Let alone that it can't happen. And, of course, any number of truly hardcore moral objectivists among us will scoff at this uncertainty. After all, they have already connected the dots between meaning and morality such that there is no difference. At least not up in the philosophical clouds.

However there are also serious problems with this new candidate for the direction of our inquiry. Unlike this question of the meaning of the play, this question about life seems to be a request for a kind of knowledge. But what would it mean to know that human life is a comedy or a tragedy, or a random mixture of elements of both? And how would such knowledge be confirmed?

On the other hand, we still live in a world where many make little or no distinction between what they claim to know is true and what actually is true. In fact, some seem more intent on going after those who claim to know something else entirely.

As for whether the human condition is a comedy or a tragedy or a combination of both, that isn't the right question from my frame of mind. Instead, the more relevant question would seem to revolve around why some call particular experiences tragic while others see them as anything but. And those who laugh at things that others are devastated regarding.

Your usage of 'tragedy ' and 'comedy' is superficial .You seem think to comedy is a story that makes you laugh out loud, and a tragedy is a story that rather makes you want to cry.
While those may apply to comedy and tragedy they are not essential to comedy and tragedy. Both 'tragedy' and 'comedy' refer to how the story tells truths. Comedy is when the story ends happily for the protagonists: tragedy is when the story ends sadly for the protagonists. Both comedy and tragedy portray meanings. Meaning hovers within the relationship between the audience on the one hand and the story teller on the other .

[Walker]

Obviously, when the search for meaning ends, wu wei continues the activity of burning off old karma, like a turntable winding down from 78, to 45, to 33, to collecting dust.

The AI that requires me to keep verifying that I’m human has a poor memory, although so far the repeated question hasn’t caused doubt that I am.

If AI can cast doubt on that, it will have human converts. HINO's.

[iambiguous]

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

Albert Camus judges human life to be absurd because of the incompatibility between the human desire for rational order and the silence of the world: “I said the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said." 

But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. 

Clarity here, however, Is an endless tug of war between those on conflicting sides of ever evolving moral conflagrations.

Also, over and again, I make what I construe to be a crucial distinction between being reasonable in the either/or world -- facts are facts are facts are facts -- and grappling with conflicting goods in a world bursting at the seams with moral objectivists all claiming to, in fact, embody the best of all possible worlds. Either that or, for some, the only possible rational [and thus virtuous] world there has ever been, is now and always will be.

In turn, what others see instead as absurd are those who refuse to recognize just how crucial the "scientific" contributions of Marx and Engels were in intertwining existentialism and political economy:

"Camus joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in early 1935. He saw it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria", even though he was not a Marxist. He explained: "We might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities." wiki

Whatever that means, perhaps, but to the extent it precipitates many different and conflicting assessments from those all up and down the normative spectrum, failures to communicate will continue to go one and on and on and on. 

"The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.” If this is an accurate rendering of our condition this is certainly tragic, for it makes of the human struggle an exercise in abject futility. But in this case, the tragedy of human life, far from establishing its meaningfulness, would derive from its absurdity.

Although here, of course, it can depend just as much on how it is defined. And then on those strings of analytic deductions derived from that definition. All in order at least to pin the absurd down theoretically. And words like "futility" are no less based on sets of assumptions regarding the human condition that may well be essentially meaningless themselves.

[Belinda]

The search for meaning isn't the same as the search for the meaning of life.

The former is what scientists and religionists do, and the latter is what responsible adult humans do.
Scientists and religionists try to discover a meaning that exists a priori, whereas responsible adult humans create their own meanings of their own lives.

[iambiguous]

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

Experiencing Meaninglessness

These many confusions [above] are indications of a deeper perplexity, I think. We need to return to the origin of the question in our experience in order to uncover the source of these difficulties and to see the true nature of the problem of life in its original presentation, its primary meaning.

You want complexity? Consider abstractions like this and explain their relevance given actual moral and political conflagrations.

The question of the meaning of life is less likely to be conceived in wonder than in a mood of disquietude. It is not asked seriously in a spirit of disinterested intellectual curiosity or grateful life-affirmation. Rather it emerges when one’s sense of the meaningfulness of life has been deeply shaken – when one fears that life, or at least one’s own life, is without meaning.

How is it even possible to go from the cradle to the grave in this world and expect to find an essential meaning? On the other hand, I am still one of the very few in this world who is convinced that there isn't one. At least not in regard to conflicting goods. Then those who couldn't care less about it. Those, for example, who spend much of their time embodying pop culture, mindless consumption, and the hope that someday their own fifteen minutes will arrive and they too can be celebrities. On YouTube, or tictok, reality TV, or some other "social media" platform.

The typical intonation of the question may be more revealing than the words. “What can it all mean?” may have more in common with a sigh than with a grammatical question. It’s an announcement that the foundation of one’s sense of meaning has been undermined. The question declares that the bulwarks are crumbling, that they seem now to have been the fabrications of a remarkably comprehensive self-deception: How could I have believed that this repetitive, pallid daily routine had the slightest significance? What besides the mere fact that this life is mine had convinced me that its victories and losses counted for something?

Tell me about it. On the other hand, for many of us, in regard to family and friends and work and school and politics and the arts, and sports and everything else that keeps us grounded existentially in meaning from day to day to, along with those comfortably ensconced in one or another religious faith, this frame of mind might pop up from time to to time, but few will dwell on it...philosophically?

To wit..

If the nihilistic condition becomes more severe, these questions cast a pall over every observation and every encounter. Why is that woman so elegantly dressed, so punctiliously made up? What foolish vanity possessed her in her elaborate preparations? Why is that man chasing the ball so intently? Can he really believe that any importance whatsoever attaches to his returning the serve? Why are those people laughing so gaily? Is there not something false, desperate, in those guttural eruptions?

For any number of men and women? No, no way. They take their day to day interactions as meaning enough for them. And since millions upon millions interact with each other given the reality of subsistence itself, nihilism is often understood by them in very different ways.

[Belinda]

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

Experiencing Meaninglessness

These many confusions [above] are indications of a deeper perplexity, I think. We need to return to the origin of the question in our experience in order to uncover the source of these difficulties and to see the true nature of the problem of life in its original presentation, its primary meaning.

You want complexity? Consider abstractions like this and explain their relevance given actual moral and political conflagrations.

The question of the meaning of life is less likely to be conceived in wonder than in a mood of disquietude. It is not asked seriously in a spirit of disinterested intellectual curiosity or grateful life-affirmation. Rather it emerges when one’s sense of the meaningfulness of life has been deeply shaken – when one fears that life, or at least one’s own life, is without meaning.

How is it even possible to go from the cradle to the grave in this world and expect to find an essential meaning? On the other hand, I am still one of the very few in this world who is convinced that there isn't one. At least not in regard to conflicting goods. Then those who couldn't care less about it. Those, for example, who spend much of their time embodying pop culture, mindless consumption, and the hope that someday their own fifteen minutes will arrive and they too can be celebrities. On YouTube, or tictok, reality TV, or some other "social media" platform.

The typical intonation of the question may be more revealing than the words. “What can it all mean?” may have more in common with a sigh than with a grammatical question. It’s an announcement that the foundation of one’s sense of meaning has been undermined. The question declares that the bulwarks are crumbling, that they seem now to have been the fabrications of a remarkably comprehensive self-deception: How could I have believed that this repetitive, pallid daily routine had the slightest significance? What besides the mere fact that this life is mine had convinced me that its victories and losses counted for something?

Tell me about it. On the other hand, for many of us, in regard to family and friends and work and school and politics and the arts, and sports and everything else that keeps us grounded existentially in meaning from day to day to, along with those comfortably ensconced in one or another religious faith, this frame of mind might pop up from time to to time, but few will dwell on it...philosophically?

To wit..

If the nihilistic condition becomes more severe, these questions cast a pall over every observation and every encounter. Why is that woman so elegantly dressed, so punctiliously made up? What foolish vanity possessed her in her elaborate preparations? Why is that man chasing the ball so intently? Can he really believe that any importance whatsoever attaches to his returning the serve? Why are those people laughing so gaily? Is there not something false, desperate, in those guttural eruptions?

For any number of men and women? No, no way. They take their day to day interactions as meaning enough for them. And since millions upon millions interact with each other given the reality of subsistence itself, nihilism is often understood by them in very different ways.

The meaning of your life is the story of your life .

[iambiguous]

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

Camus writes of a man in a telephone booth whose animated dumbshow he observes from a distance. Why, he asks, is this man alive? Is not the entire human scene undergirded by a thoroughgoing tacit conspiracy of interlocking deceptions?

Why, one might ask, are any of us alive? And, in fact, short of embracing one or another One True Path, who really knows? In other words, who here can actually demonstrate substantively how and why the human condition came to be? How far back need they go? How far back can they go?    

In Heidegger’s Being and Time, das Man is the conspiracy of the nameless, the everyone and no one, to assure a universal tranquillized flight from the anguishing demands of authentic individuation.

Either that or you are indoctrinated as a child to accept one or another One True Path and are then able to sustain it all the way to the grave. Also, the part where many, historically, place the emphasis not on the individual but on society...on the social parameters of the community. For example, the National Socialists.

Is not the principal accomplishment of das Man this most fundamental social contract – the unspoken compact we enter into to protect ourselves from the isolating and crippling realization that there is no significance whatsoever in either our individual or our collective presence on this earth?

Then those who defend a "fundamental social contract", as well, but insist that they have either discovered or invented the only truly rational -- and thus virtuous? -- FSC there can possibly be?

It's just a matter of which particular font is selected to "prove" it. And, as always, either God or No God.

Granted, this mood sustained over days and weeks, or incorporated into one’s manner of being, is an extreme state. But is there anyone for whom this kind of alienation is wholly unfamiliar?

Sure, but I suspect that such moods are then subsumed in the fonts chosen above. Any number of experiences may well shake one's faith in the font, but the only alternative is to find another objectivist font [as I did over and again] or to embody the alienation all the way to the grave through distractions [as I did/do over and again.]  

Still, most of us most of the time dismiss such thoughts as expressions of a passing perversity. What, then, allows this mood to entrench itself when it does? What are the conditions for a preoccupation with emptiness and futility?

How can this not be embedded and embodied existentially in dasein? I still vividly recall the conditions that reconfigured me into accepting it.

[iambiguous]

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

Our premonition of the meaninglessness of life is a case of our capacity for disinterested reflection serving a personal will for release. Weary with life, we wish to withdraw from it, and intellect furnishes an irrefutable justification for doing so.

The "tired of living, but scared of dying" frame of mind.

On the other hand, it's likely that those living very different lives will experience this in ways that may not always be easily communicated. We might have completely different reasons for withdrawing. And the chances are for those who do withdraw, it will be a circumstantial quagmire that precipitates the tug of war, and not an "intellectual" perspective.

The significances with which we invest our daily agitation are of strictly human invention; they are not shared by the dog in the chair falling into the slumber of boredom, nor by the feverish soldier termite protecting its hive against assault, nor by the placid angel strumming its harp in the clouds.

Are we perhaps the only creatures in the entire universe able to experience this? Then the part where some will wonder if they are actually experiencing it at all. Autonomously, in other words.

Still, if there are placid angels strumming their harps up in the clouds, that introduces God into the picture. And tell me [if there is one] that doesn't change everything.

And my deeply felt personal significances begin with the birth of my consciousness and end with its dissolution – never to be shared, never to be repeated.

Except, of course, no one really knows for sure what exactly "my consciousness" encompasses. Either going back to God or to a No God universe in which "somehow" matter was just able to become self conscious of itself as matter. Spooky to say the least.

It is also my distinctly human point of view that allows me to perceive what is pitiable in another’s situation, what is triumphant in a person’s self-overcoming, what is humorous in someone’s pretensions. And it is my individual subjectivity that enables me to experience without mediation the urgency of events in my own life.

No, in my view, it is our own distinctly individual point of view as mere mortals in a No God universe that is most crucial regarding human interactions. Some things are clearly applicable to all of us. But other things are not.

[Martin Peter Clarke]

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

Our premonition of the meaninglessness of life is a case of our capacity for disinterested reflection serving a personal will for release. Weary with life, we wish to withdraw from it, and intellect furnishes an irrefutable justification for doing so.

The "tired of living, but scared of dying" frame of mind.

On the other hand, it's likely that those living very different lives will experience this in ways that may not always be easily communicated. We might have completely different reasons for withdrawing. And the chances are for those who do withdraw, it will be a circumstantial quagmire that precipitates the tug of war, and not an "intellectual" perspective.

The significances with which we invest our daily agitation are of strictly human invention; they are not shared by the dog in the chair falling into the slumber of boredom, nor by the feverish soldier termite protecting its hive against assault, nor by the placid angel strumming its harp in the clouds.

Are we perhaps the only creatures in the entire universe able to experience this? Then the part where some will wonder if they are actually experiencing it at all. Autonomously, in other words.

Still, if there are placid angels strumming their harps up in the clouds, that introduces God into the picture. And tell me [if there is one] that doesn't change everything.

And my deeply felt personal significances begin with the birth of my consciousness and end with its dissolution – never to be shared, never to be repeated.

Except, of course, no one really knows for sure what exactly "my consciousness" encompasses. Either going back to God or to a No God universe in which "somehow" matter was just able to become self conscious of itself as matter. Spooky to say the least.

It is also my distinctly human point of view that allows me to perceive what is pitiable in another’s situation, what is triumphant in a person’s self-overcoming, what is humorous in someone’s pretensions. And it is my individual subjectivity that enables me to experience without mediation the urgency of events in my own life.

No, in my view, it is our own distinctly individual point of view as mere mortals in a No God universe that is most crucial regarding human interactions. Some things are clearly applicable to all of us. But other things are not.

No of course we're not. Universe? Singular? How?

The God hypothesis cannot even be got to philosophically. It can't survive the posit, the let's pretend.

Meaning is what we make it, how we feel: the ultimate manifestation of the illusion of free will.