Steve said to dmb:
What I was trying to portray is what a complete lack of nihilism would be like.
It is not to to say that meaning is not worth asking about. The complete lack
of nihilism is the perspective where the question of meaning is not a question
one even has. It is not a question when meaning is self-evident. One who is
complete in the lack of nihilism never thinks to go looking for the
justification for the world in some other more true world because life is
already meaningful.
dmb says:
Still seems pretty fishy, Steve. Yes, the question of meaning is not going to
come up if you think life is already meaningful, when the meaning of life is
"self evident". This is a logically sound assertion. But who are these people?
Who thinks the meaning of life is obvious or that life is obviously meaningful?
I mean, it seems to me that the issue is very much present in the culture, that
a widespread sense of meaninglessness has been identified by artists and
philosophers in various ways over the last century or so. Nietzsche's
announcement about the death of God and re-valuation of all values might mark
the spot where our kind of nihilism was hatched. Aren't you're talking about
trying to come to terms with that? The loss of that externally imposed meaning
has been widely reported as painful and perplexing, you know? So the idea that
some people find that life is obviously meaningful doesn't seem very realistic.
I think you have a relative few people who are comfortable without it and then
you have a whole lot of people who turn back to the old inherited meanings or
they find something even crazier to replace it.
Steve said:
... To say "what does this mean?" or "what is this for?" whether talking about
the usage of a term or the purpose of a hammer amounts to "how is this used?"
So, to ask, "what is the meaning or purpose of life?", is to ask, "how is life
used?" Life is clearly used in lots and lots of different ways. We can talk
about what ways are better and worse than others, but on this view where
meaning and purpose are pragmatically understood as use the complete lack of
meaning can never be a problem for anyone who lives and thus uses life.
dmb says:
I want to be sympathetic the pragmatic approach but this doesn't work for me
either. Here "meaning" is used in a different sense of the word. To say how
it's used would explain its instrumental value or its functional purpose.
That's the same kind of nihilism of the religious who "use" their lives as an
instrument to obtain a higher purpose, to get to heaven and all that. The
non-nihilist is going to say that life is inherently meaningful, right?
Steve said:
As Yann Martell wrote, just as music is noises that make sense and art is
colors and lines that make sense, so stories are life that makes sense. Having
meaning or making sense of life is then a matter of being able to tell a story
of progress toward a better world. Some attach themselves to a grand epic
offered to them by one of the world's religions or a down to earth political
cause or performing a particular social role or in some other way of having
meaning that is offered to us by our societies, and some, the poets of life
among us, even eschew such existential comforts and heroically make their own
new stories such that others may later find meaning in unheard of ways that no
one before ever imagined. Perhaps the future will not just be better, it will
be unimaginably better. This is a hope I share with many of the religious.
dmb says:
Yea, I don't know if that's what meaning means but I can relate to the desire
to get in there somewhere and do something that matters. My old friend Frank
used to say that sex is about 10% of a rich, full life - and 90% of an empty
one. As the classic mid-life scenario goes, the crisis hits when you get all
the "stuff" you thought you wanted - or more likely - the stuff you thought you
were supposed to want. You even have love at home, some level of respect at
work but then you wake up one day and say to yourself, "is this it?" "Is that
all there is to life?" One guy I know studied a lot of existential theater and
literature, fancies himself a philosopher. If you ask him what the meaning of
life is, he'll say, "You eat, you shit, you fuck and then you die". He seemed
quite sincere. That's a nihilist. He lives in the suburbs. Paints houses for
money and does pretty well. I suppose it's a bit precious to worry about such
things. Maybe it's just me being a snob, but it seems that most people are much
more interested in being important or powerful and confuse that with meaning.
You know, everybody wants to a player. Everybody wants to be star.
Wiki says, "In Platonism, the meaning of life is in attaining the highest form
of knowledge, which is the Idea (Form) of the Good, from which all good and
just things derive utility and value. Human beings are duty-bound to pursue the
good, but no one can succeed in that pursuit without philosophical reasoning,
which allows for true knowledge."
Aristotle said: "Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and
choice of action, is thought to have some good as its object. This is why the
good has rightly been defined as the object of all endeavor [...]Everything is
done with a goal, and that goal is 'good'." —Nicomachean Ethics 1.1
Not to change the subject, but doesn't seem like a much more sensible question?
Instead of asking what life means, maybe we should be asking about the good
life, about the best way to live. Despite their differences, Plato and
Aristotle are both connecting "the good" with a meaningful and happy life. It's
an awfully vague goal, and that's what's so good about it. If it gets much more
specific, then we're right back in the soup and it's just another externally
imposed meaning. Good is goal of all endeavor. Add that to Pirsig's idea that
art is any high quality endeavor. They add up to an idea that the meaning of
life is to live artfully.
Or something like that.
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