23 | December | 2009 | The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

December 23, 2009

The Meaning of Life / the Purpose of Life

What do we mean by meaning of life? When someone asks us what the meaning of life is, how do we begin to answer that question.

What do we mean by meaning of? If someone were to ask us what is the meaning of X, what type of answer would we give? Descriptive? Or normative?

When someone asks us what the meaning of a word is we give them a definition. In other words, we are attaching the signifier to the signified.

If we see a penalty flag thrown down in a football game, we may lean over to a more knowledgeable spectator and ask “what is the meaning of this flag?” Again, we expect a description of what the flag signifies — which in this context will refer to the general rule, the causes of the rule’s breach, and the effect of the rule’s breach. We may also want to know the reason for the rule. Of course, there may be no strong reason — the rule may simply be a coordinating rule, followed and enforced merely to preserve order.

All words are icebergs, their signifier obscuring and summoning the vast unknown definitions and objects and relationships signified by the sign. Objects too, when subjected to the gaze of consciousness, are icebergs, calling forth to the questioning minds the strangeness of its presence and the nature of its relationship in and with the greater universe. When we ask about the meaning of an object, we are asking for an explanation of those submerged relationships that ground and illuminate the object’s existence.

Life is such an object. When we ask about the meaning of life, we are asking to be told about life’s place in the universe. To the extent that what we are really asking about is the human life, we are asking about humanity’s place in the universe — all the things it can do, achieve, be — we are asking what is signified, or summoned, by our being?

So … what is signified? What is relevant to our Being-In-the-World? The first is clearly that we exist — being. The second is that we are not alone — that we are with others. The third is that our actions have consequences, potentially significant ones. The fourth is that we are mortal, and the dead do not interact with the living and cannot act on the world. This is our place, the ground-state of our existence.

Certain conclusions and relationships follow. By virtue of the structure of our being, we love pleasure and hate pain. By virtue of the design of our species, we can communicate with others and discern that they exist in the world in the same way that we exist in the world. Through our actions, we discover that we can structure our world so as to vary the amount of pain and pleasure we would otherwise experience. We discover that our actions involving others can cause pain and pleasure, in ourselves and in the others. And by virtue of our species, we delight in others, some others more than other others, and some others more than even ourselves.

And of course, presupposing all these reflections, we understand that we can reflect, that our minds are able to model the universe and act out potential actions and interactions — and doing so has direct consequences to our ability to change the world in order to vary the amount of pain and pleasure we receive.

Reflection suggests (and for provides the means for) a system of rules that could aim your world-changing-actions in a certain chosen direction. These rules would regulate our actions involving only the world and our interactions involving others.

Whatever these rules are, they should provide a theory of the personal good (what is pleasure and pain for myself and what I will do to achieve them, the Aim and the Path) and a theory of relationships (how shall I interact with others). Our theory of relationships will include a theory of morality, which will tell us what we can and cannot do to others.

Our mortality will merely sharpen all of these considerations. These then are the rules of our existence.

Still, with only the grounding of our existence and the rules of our existence, something is left out. We don’t yet know the hows and whys of our existence — the connection between our particular existential grounding and the greater universe. We understand the football penalty and its operation, but we want to know why the penalty exists. We want to be explained what football is. We want to know our place in the universe.

It is amazing what we have accomplished so far in the childhood of our species, merely by looking. We now know what the universe is (ever expanding space, stuff, and force) and what we are (self-perpetuating complex stardust). We are the Children of the Universe. This is our world. This is our place.

Leave a comment

December 23, 2009

A Critique of Tradition

Just because it is old does not mean that it is good. In fact, one may have a standing presumptive suspicion of tradition, in the sense that the formers of the tradition did so with less information then is available to you. (Unless you are now reasoning from a point of less available information — i.e., Charlemagne’s Aachen instead of Aurelius’ Rome.)

At the same time, one must be humble to one’s own place. We may be less ignorant, but we are not more wise. Therefore, there is likely much in tradition worth salvaging, however unfashionable, garish, or wrong its trappings.

See, e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Speech

(“

I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience – to reject all progress – all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.”)

Leave a comment

December 23, 2009

Darwin and Religion

“A man regarded in 2009 as an avatar of atheism had originally intended to become a clergyman and, even after he had fallen away from any semblance of Anglican orthodoxy, agreed with the Reverend Charles Kingsley and the Reverend William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, that it was just as ‘noble’ a conception of God that he worked through divinely instituted natural laws as that he used his powers directly to create each species. Four years after the Origin appeared, Kingsley wrote that ‘God’s greatness, goodness and perpetual care I never understood as I have since I became a convert to Mr Darwin’s views.’ Darwin insisted that he saw no good reason why evolution by natural selection ‘should shock the religious feelings of anyone’. Nor do those now using Darwin to power up secularism have much time for the historical figure whose funeral at Westminster Abbey was the occasion for the archdeacon to praise Darwin for having read ‘many hitherto undeciphered lines in God’s great epic of the universe’. Disbelief, Darwin wrote, eventually ‘crept over’ him, but that disbelief is less accurately categorised as atheism than as an unstable mix of agnosticism and a robust form of deism not uncommon among clerics of the Victorian Church of England. Even in America, many late 19th-century Protestant theologians had no great problem reconciling evolution with a rational and purified Christianity. (The strong assimilation of human beings and their mental capacities to the animal model was a sticking point for many – but then it still is.) Nor was biblical fundamentalism nearly as much a feature of Victorian opposition to Darwin as it is of the early 21st century. There are almost certainly more ‘young earth creationists’ – those claiming that the world was created in exactly six 24-hour days somewhere between 5700 and 10,000 years ago – among the educated and semi-educated classes now than there were in Darwin’s time.”

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n01/steven-shapin/the-darwin-show

Of course, the fact that we are animals does not mean that we are only animals. Just as ants communicating with pheromones emerge into some strange thing called community, so too individual humans, with their community of mind and probability-calculators and metalevel-thinking might be something more.

Additionally, one is reminded of Peter Altenberg, who famously said, in answer to a paramour’s critique that he was only interested in her sexually, “what’s so only?”