How [Un]Comfortable Are You...?

[Passacaglia]

...With the idea that life lacks inherent meaning?

I.e., the idea that whatever meaning we ascribe to our lives results from what we accept from our various cultures or beliefs, or what we consciously choose to ascribe to our lives. I heard a radio program last night which touched on one of the philosophies which rejects inherent meaning, and when one of the speakers mentioned how uncomfortable this idea is for so many people, I found myself wondering just how much and many people find this idea uncomfortable.

So, my question is as the title: How [un]comfortable are you with the idea that life lacks inherent meaning?

 

[sprinkles]

I find it to be a non-issue.

It puts me at odds with a lot of people though. It also informs my worldviews which puts me even further at odds. Yet I don't really even think about meaning that much when it pertains to life in general because the meta sense of 'life' is actually far removed from immediate experience.

If you're hungry there's no point in worrying about whether eating a sandwich has any inherent meaning - just eat the damn sandwich.

It's not positive. It's not negative. It's not good or bad. It's just there and to me complaining about it is like complaining that the sky isn't yellow instead of blue.

 

[Nicodemus]

At this point, it is more of a relief than anything else.

 

[Beorn]

I find it to be a non-issue.

It puts me at odds with a lot of people though. It also informs my worldviews which puts me even further at odds. Yet I don't really even think about meaning that much when it pertains to life in general because the meta sense of 'life' is actually far removed from immediate experience.

If you're hungry there's no point in worrying about whether eating a sandwich has any inherent meaning - just eat the damn sandwich.

It's not positive. It's not negative. It's not good or bad. It's just there and to me complaining about it is like complaining that the sky isn't yellow instead of blue.

At this point, it is more of a relief than anything else.

Enter the buffered self.

Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings.

See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is ipso facto declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things. This step of disengagement depends on our modern mind/body distinction, and the relegation of the physical to being “just” a contingent cause of the psychic.

But a pre-modern may not be helped by learning that his mood comes from black bile, because this doesn’t permit a distancing. Black bile is melancholy. Now he just knows that he’s in the grips of the real thing.

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here and in A Secular Age. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.

These two descriptions get at, respectively, the two important facets of this contrast. First, the porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear. For instance, the kind of thing vividly portrayed in some of the paintings of Bosch.
- Charles Taylor

Of course despite this buffer most people are haunted by what lies beyond the self.

 

[gromit]

I dunno.

I kind of feel like we create meaning with our choices and our actions and our relationships. We can lead a life that's mostly devoid of meaning, I suppose. And even at points in my life when I've been a bit depressed, I've started to feel that life is meaningless.

But I do think life in general is worthwhile, and meaningful.

I don't know what you mean by "inherent' really.

 

[sprinkles]

[MENTION=5789]Beorn[/MENTION]

It's not that 'external' and distant things don't get to me (I don't consider a difference between internal and external) it's that they're not relevant.

Consider Shikantaza. The point of it is to sit and let things be. Everything simply unfolds. You do not block anything out, you don't distance yourself, you don't separate between inner and outer worlds. Things simply are.

If you're already living then what's left to worry about? You already got this far didn't you?

 

[Nicodemus]

Apparently, [MENTION=5789]Beorn[/MENTION]'s reaction is denial.

I dunno.

I kind of feel like we create meaning with our choices and our actions and our relationships. We can lead a life that's mostly devoid of meaning, I suppose. And even at points in my life when I've been a bit depressed, I've started to feel that life is meaningless.

But I do think life in general is worthwhile, and meaningful.

I don't know what you mean by "inherent' really.

What he means by 'inherent' is that you have to create meaning for it to be there, that there is none to life in and of itself.

 

[sprinkles]

I dunno.

I kind of feel like we create meaning with our choices and our actions and our relationships. We can lead a life that's mostly devoid of meaning, I suppose. And even at points in my life when I've been a bit depressed, I've started to feel that life is meaningless.

But I do think life in general is worthwhile, and meaningful.

I don't know what you mean by "inherent' really.

Things are worthwhile. Life is filled with things. The world is filled with things. Things are not life and the world is not life.

Life is an abstracted notion of little significance without a context. If you were stuck in a complete isolation chamber and had nothing to do ever but were kept alive, that is life, but is it still worth it?

 

[gromit]

Apparently, [MENTION=5789]Beorn[/MENTION]'s reaction is denial.


He he means by 'inherent' is that you have to create meaning for it to be there, that there is none to life in and of itself.

Oh I don't know if there's baseline meaning below that which we create. I know we can create more, but I don't know if it's there to begin with. I like to think it is, but I only know what my mind can conceive of.

 

[Beorn]

Apparently, [MENTION=5789]Beorn[/MENTION]'s reaction is denial.

At least if it is denial then my denial is of no significance.

 

[sprinkles]

He he means by 'inherent' is that you have to create meaning for it to be there, that there is none to life in and of itself.

Yes. Inherent means that the quality is automatic and self contained and doesn't depend on external factors - or in other words an essential character, a quality which is not added and cannot be taken out.

Take the isolation chamber I proposed a minute ago for example. If life has inherent meaning then it is still meaningful no matter how many things you take away (and we can include this as a logical extension of the fact that there's always some people living with less 'things' than others but we still call it life)

If you live in a complete void for eternity that is still your life and the argument that life has inherent meaning would say that this life is still meaningful. I wonder how many people would actually agree once they got into it?

 

[Beorn]

[MENTION=5789]Beorn[/MENTION]

It's not that 'external' and distant things don't get to me (I don't consider a difference between internal and external) it's that they're not relevant.

Consider Shikantaza. The point of it is to sit and let things be. Everything simply unfolds. You do not block anything out, you don't distance yourself, you don't separate between inner and outer worlds. Things simply are.

If you're already living then what's left to worry about? You already got this far didn't you?

I'm not sure your definition of external and internal are the same as Taylor's. But admittedly Taylor is mostly focused on the western world and deals little with the eastern world where people tend to come to terms with the enchanted realm in a different way.

 

[Beorn]

Oh I don't know if there's baseline meaning below that which we create. I know we can create more, but I don't know if it's there to begin with. I like to think it is, but I only know what my mind can conceive of.

I think this is the state that most people are in. Where doubts about non-belief (in an enchanted world) linger.

Let me know if I've mischaracterized you.

In the same way as a believer I have doubts about the enchanted world in a way that premodern westerners never would have.

So almost nobody feels secure in their understanding of the world in the way that people used to.

 

[00c]

We work on goal-striving mechanisms and the idea that life has no meaning is ultimately saying that everything we do is pointless and that there is no ultimate goal, which is not true, but yet those who do choose to live by it and believe it would certainly be rather miserable given that they've likely given up on any goal and have little to look forward to and work towards.

I'm comfortable, I've got goals and this existence is much more wondrous than most let themselves believe given how pervasive closed-mindedness is.
Coincidentally, look at all of the miserable people who trap their minds inside of boxes and compare them to those who let them run free towards where they want them to run. Mindfulness and all of that stuff. Surely, you'll only believe what you yourself work on the most on in your head by your own set of beliefs, so those who choose to believe in a "meaningless existence" will only look towards every reason to make it a meaningless existence and those who look to make it a meaningful existence will make it a meaningful existence. It's all only and always a matter of what you believe in.

 

[sprinkles]

We work on goal-striving mechanisms and the idea that life has no meaning is ultimately saying that everything we do is pointless and that there is no ultimate goal, which is not true, but yet those who do choose to live by it and believe it would certainly be rather miserable given that they've likely given up on any goal and have little to look forward to and work towards.

I'm comfortable, I've got goals and this existence is much more wondrous than most let themselves believe given how pervasive closed-mindedness is.

That's only true if you equate goals with life. Not everyone makes this equivocation.

Moreover you have no right to tell other people that they're unhappy. You can only say this about yourself.

 

[00c]

That's only true if you equate goals with life. Not everyone makes this equivocation.

Moreover you have no right to tell other people that they're unhappy. You can only say this about yourself.

There's research to back it, have you done any extensive research on the topic?

People eat to feel better, people hurt themselves to feel better, people do things every single day in the manner of goals to feel better or more miserable about themselves, we live by goals, we survive by goals.

You're wrong. You seem to live by "can't"s, "won't"s, and "don't"s, so what you say is of little value to me (I mean no disrespect), it's rather closed-minded, it's what I previously mentioned.

 

[gromit]

I think this is the state that most people are in. Where doubts about non-belief (in an enchanted world) linger.

Let me know if I've mischaracterized you.

In the same way as a believer I have doubts about the enchanted world in a way that premodern westerners never would have.

So almost nobody feels secure in their understanding of the world in the way that people used to.

Yeah perhaps!

 

[sprinkles]

There's research to back it, have you done any extensive research on the topic?

People eat to feel better, people hurt themselves to feel better, people do things every single day in the manner of goals to feel better or more miserable about themselves, we live by goals, we survive by goals.

You're wrong.

There is a VAST difference between saying that life has no inherent meaning, and believing that it needs to have one or otherwise you must stuff your face with 10,000 cakes in order to numb the pain.

You're not understanding, you're mischaracterizing, you're relying on your boxed in beliefs and YOU are wrong.

 

[Nicodemus]

So almost nobody feels secure in their understanding of the world in the way that people used to.

I recommend Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock and The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist if you are interested in what happened to the enchanted world. The former proposes it was the alphabet and literacy which changed our thinking, the latter contributes it to a power shift within the human brain in which the left ~logical hemisphere (the emissary) gained undue power over the right ~holistic hemisphere (its master). I think you would like McGilchrist's book, not least because, taken just a bit too far, it also gives you ammunition against the scientific modern world you so deplore.

 

[00c]

There is a VAST difference between saying that life has no inherent meaning, and believing that it needs to have one or otherwise you must stuff your face with 10,000 cakes in order to numb the pain.

You're not understanding, you're mischaracterizing, you're relying on your boxed in beliefs and YOU are wrong.

You're wrong. It's all one and the same.

"Mischaracterization" is based on the premise that everything is different, but it's not really, is it? You're saying that it all can't be the same, whole, while I'm saying that it can. The power of belief trumps doubt always.

You're wrong.