What's the meaning of life?
- anthonybrown
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
want to hear a whole lot more of what I have discovered in a lifetime of research? just let me know
- JohnB53
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
So we can feel free to make sense of it. Each person makes sense of it all in their own unique way. It' s bad to not try to make ones own sense of it in a sincere way.JohnB53 wrote: ↑October 29th, 2018, 9:24 am Life is meaningless, it is no more than uncollated sense data that a euphemistically termed societal concept reason imposes order upon. We are tossed; thrown, unto a godless, meaningless, expanse of space and time forced comport with other finite historical consciousness which next to death is our biggest problem.
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- LuckyR
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- SimpleGuy
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
Belindi wrote: ↑October 29th, 2018, 2:13 pmSo we can feel free to make sense of it. Each person makes sense of it all in their own unique way. It' s bad to not try to make ones own sense of it in a sincere way.JohnB53 wrote: ↑October 29th, 2018, 9:24 am Life is meaningless, it is no more than uncollated sense data that a euphemistically termed societal concept reason imposes order upon. We are tossed; thrown, unto a godless, meaningless, expanse of space and time forced comport with other finite historical consciousness which next to death is our biggest problem.
I do agree to your Point of view , except that there is an aspect of personal perception of sense that is not valid for everybody else. So the non invariant Point of sense that is nonperceptible for others is a could be aspect of sense.
- SimpleGuy
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- Numb3rThr33
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- ktz
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- Favorite Philosopher: Habermas
Re: What's the meaning of life?
I've encountered a few different interesting approaches to this question in my own praxis. I mentioned Sartre, but Frankl with his incredibly struggles and background in practical neuropsychiatry is, in my view, the most powerful existentialist writer on this topic, with quotes like: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” And, "What is to give light must endure burning." Frankl, writing in his excellent book Man's Search for Meaning, accepts as his answer three things to be pursued as the meaning of life: Purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty. Maria Popova's summary on him on Brainpickings is quite a good entry point to this thinking. I think one could do a lot worse than living a life filled with purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty, and anyone coming on here with nihilistic conceptions of life's meaninglessness I think ought to take some time to truly consider this line of thinking, for their own sake. At the very least before approaching Camus's philosophical problem. Other interesting thinkers along this path are Maslow, who developed in conjunction with Frankl the concept of self-transcendence on top of his hierarchy of needs and Goldstein's conception of self-actualization. Fromm, who talks about the distraction of materialist desires in his book, "To Have or To Be", and Kierkegaard who provides a more spiritual perspective on existentialism.
Lately, I've taken to compiling a new idea from reading bits from cyberneticist Francis Heylighen and biologist Edward O Wilson. With Heylighen I'm paraphrasing because a lot of his work is too technical for me to understand, but he has this quite tantalizing idea of a "Global Brain" as an emergent phenomena from the complexity of modern human society, and so it evokes the need for a kind of Darwinian fitness for our collective endeavors -- that is, the meaning of life is to help extend the range of endurable and explorable situations for humanity, all DNA-based life forms, and the collection of ideas from Popper's World 3. On an individual level, any contribution we each can make to this goal -- whether academic, political, parental, or just by helping others become stronger or more evolutionarily fit in any mental or physical sense -- all are meaningful pursuits. I've affirmed this idea through EO Wilson, who writes in his book, the Meaning of Human Existence, about multi-level selection and the ability for groups of altruistic individuals to subsume groups of selfish individuals, even when at the individual level selfish individuals parasitically rise to the top.
There are real challenges facing a view like this -- the quite lethal threats of nuclear war and climate change/sixth extinction woes, our inability to overcome Habermas's "strategic action" in modern political discourse, the rise of fraud and misinformation and the empowerment of ethically bankrupt capitalists -- all make me a bit pessimistic whether or not we have long for meaningful pursuits. But this is where my thinking has led me so far, and I would be quite interested to converse with anyone with new ideas or information to enhance these ideas. Thanks for reading and may you live a courageous life in pursuit of your own conceptions of meaning, spirituality, and love.
- Numb3rThr33
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- ktz
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
It may be the case, as you say, that many of our current man-made constructs in philosophy, political economy, education etc. have iatrogenic consequences, or impose more limitations than benefits to spiritually productive and meaningful work -- but with correctly-placed effort, the "man-made" can become the "man-unmade" or the "man-improved". Please don't mistake me -- I did not reference the past because I would have preferred to be born in a time when we had simpler answer to these questions. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that the valuable opportunity each of us now has to choose our own way is a rare phenomenon that could be confined to a very short period of history. It's wrong to idolize the past -- let us instead view the present with optimistic eyes, and seek to confine our conversations on this subject to the realm of the practical and productive. It may be as you say that our true purpose has been lost, but even so, we must do the best we can with what we have.
- anthonybrown
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
- Whitedragon
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
Doves and blades - falling feathers; the meaning of life is in the falling of the feathers. (I leave the interpretation of the symbolism up to the reader)
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
When you say " There is a reason we don't know " do you mean "there is a cause of our lack of knowledge" ?There is a reason we don't know exactly what we are searching for in life, if we did know we we would get too focused on that and not consider the bigger picture.
If so, what or who is the cause of our lack of knowledge?
- anthonybrown
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Re: What's the meaning of life?
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023