The meaning of life

[ochoill]

Little to add to this, mostly agree with a lot of the above, but just to reiterate:  Life is inherently meaningless.  That doesn't mean we can't find meaning in it.  The beauty of it is realising there is no end game, there is no overall goal or grand achievement - you just have to do what you do to be happy and decent to the people you know, and yeah as cheesy as it is the journey is the reward.

The problem here is not everyone in the world lives as straightforward and privileged a life as we do, their journeys are bleak, short, hopeless, and confusing.  What is their reward?  What meaning is found in a life that is suffering and struggling from the day you're born?  I'll never know.  So I suppose it's easy for me to say it means nothing when I have the luxury of creating my own meaning and purpose.  It's something I have no answer for but it has helped me be less miserable about things.  I'm stopping myself short here before I ramble.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

This is where philosophy becomes impractical as a way to discover the meaning of life.  Unanswerable questions are useful as a technique for stretching your mind,  making it more elastic and dynamic maybe,  but are inherently pointless.

I just meant that in the Hitchhiker's Guide, earth is created as a kind of bio-computer to provide "the question to life, the universe, and everything."

"Being happy" isn't a meaning, it's just something to do. "Getting the most out of life" isn't a meaning, it's just something else to do (and won't necessarily be compatible with "being happy"). I also agree that "philosophy" is just something to do and won't ever lead to any "meaning", but when used properly it can be a powerful tool for breaking through layers of meaning others have imposed upon your life, upon our life. The biggest problem with philosophy, though, isn't at all that it's impractical, it's that almost nobody uses it to liberate themselves, they use it to exchange one (illusory) meaning of life for another. If life, the universe, and everything has no ultimate meaning, then whenever you sense yourself grasping too tightly onto a specific meaning, you're just tightening yourself into some kind of captivity. But it would also be a mistake to think that this is of itself a bad thing. In a meaningless universe, there are no bad things. Punching down at people you think are wasting their lives by not questioning it is horseshit. If you want to lash out at someone, lash out at people who are punching down, people who pretend to be superior to others simply because they've cast off the meaning they received at birth and exchanged it for a meaning they licked out of a book by whatever latest guru has come along (take your pick from the left and the right, Zizek, Peterson, Pinker, who-the-fuck-ever).

Why is Nietzsche one of the ultimate philosophers if you want to understand the meaning of life? Precisely because he tells you he doesn't want disciples, that the notion of having them is anathema to his way of seeing the world. He could only laugh at anyone who described themselves as a "Nietzschean" - it's a contradiction in terms; to call yourself a "Nietzschean" is in itself the best proof that you've understood nothing about the core of his writings.

But this all means there's nothing wrong with not questioning life, there's nothing wrong with staying inside the one conceptual lens you were born with, and there's absolutely nothing superior about doing otherwise. It's all just different modes of life, and all life (on earth at least) is just one, enormous, heaving, whole and indivisible phenomenon. That's what it is. Not its meaning, just what it is.

Blah, blah, blah... I'll sign off with a last quote to sum up my thoughts on the subject of people who punch down and people who reach the point where they let go of all that shite:

"The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, the true state of man. The sciences comprise two extremities that meet up with each other. The first is that pure, natural ignorance under which man finds himself when born. The other extremity is the place great souls reach when, having scanned all that man might know, they discover that they know nothing and meet themselves back in that same ignorance they departed from. But it is now a knowing ignorance, a self-aware ignorance. Those in-between the two, who have left natural ignorance behind but not managed to reach knowing ignorance, they are smeared with some smug knowledge and pretend to be an authority. These latter disturb the world and judge badly of everything. It is the laypeople and the wise that set the world in motion, those others look down on it and are looked down upon in return. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges them well for it."
- Pascal, Thoughts, §327

[Eoin McLove]

That's nice and poetic and hard to argue with but it is in itself a very smug statement.  You are born ignorant,  you attain the ultimate goal of knowledgeable ignorance,  you die.  So does that mean that there is an endpoint we should strive for? That ultimate ignorance? What if you only get halfway along that journey compared to the more curious person next to you but you are twice as far as the other person? Who wins? Have you achieved ultimate ignorance or are you caught between two ignorant stools,  and do you die, not an enlightened ignoramus,  merely an ignoramus?

[Eoin McLove]

Perhaps that means that meaning only lives in the moment.  It is amorphous,  it changes for you as you grow,  as you look at it and wonder at it.  If the second law of thermodynamics holds true then anything beyond the moment is irrelevant,  but that's too nihilistic a philosophy to carry you from day to day.  It's probably true,  the universe will probably end in several billion years,  and if you are a physicist researching the universe then you'll find meaning in such discoveries.  But I think that the meaning is probably in the solving of those riddles,  rather than the fatalistic acceptance of the ultimate futility of existence.

[ochoill]

I guess it implies that part of that journey to 'ultimate ignorance' is both not caring and not judging, or at least losing the idea of achieving a plane of thought being competitive or an end point at all.  Or I'm looking at it arseways 

Anyone got any good reading recs for this sort of stuff?  The only philosophical stuff I've read are excerpts of some of Plato's work online, and Nietszche's Antichrist.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

That's nice and poetic and hard to argue with but it is in itself a very smug statement.  You are born ignorant,  you attain the ultimate goal of knowledgeable ignorance,  you die.  So does that mean that there is an endpoint we should strive for? That ultimate ignorance? What if you only get halfway along that journey compared to the more curious person next to you but you are twice as far as the other person? Who wins? Have you achieved ultimate ignorance or are you caught between two ignorant stools,  and do you die, not an enlightened ignoramus,  merely an ignoramus?

There's no winning, I don't know where you're getting that from. But it does tell you that the only rational endpoint is to reach an understanding of how much is necessarily unknowable and therefore give in, let go to a state of relative ignorance. If you know at the beginning of your "quest for understanding" that this is the only endpoint, then you'll advance already in the right frame of mind. The path to yoga is yoga, etc. (Readers of Nietzsche may recognize the person of the overman in this statement; the destination is to be a bridge towards.)

It also provides a rational argument for not being a dick towards people you consider to be less "learned" than you, since on a scale of total ignorance to total knowledge, there is no measurable difference between any two states of human "learnedness" so close they both fall to total ignorance when marked on that scale.

[Eoin McLove]

Is the most effective way to move forward in ignorance then to do nothing? Lie down and wait for death? Life is short but that sounds like it would be a long oul stint.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

That would be a nihilistic interpretation of the idea. There are many, many, many other ways of interpreting it; that's part of the point.

[Eoin McLove]

Indeed.  The point is what I was getting at and which others have brought up as well.  Life is essentially meaningless, so far as we know scientifically, so any meaning we attach to it is our own rather than divinely ordained.  Maybe the question is is meaning meaningless even if it provides fuel for our otherwise meaningless existence.  But then we are getting into philosophical circular thinking.  And maybe philosophy is the wrong place to look for meaning.  Maybe it's too focused on deconstruction to offer a road map for being.  But we exist,  that much we can say with some certainty, so if we exist there must be some kind of truth to that.  It could be knitting, that's all I'm saying. 

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Well, Alan Watts also once communicated zen to the seeking western mind like this: "the meaning of life is just to be alive."

[Pedrito]

All very interesting ideas and I would add that 'life is meaningless' is one philosophy towards life. I would also clarify that I was posing a question earlier about happiness. Is happiness the ultimate goal? Frankl allowed himself to be 'happy' in Auschwitz. It meant that he survived where others didn't. And yet others would see the chasing of fleeting moments, the cup of tae and the 5 finger shuffle as a waste of the great potential we have. More stoic types, monks, warriors etc who purposely avoid those pleasures in order to discipline themselves and put order on their lives. So, who is 'right' and does 'right' even exist?


Another point I would add is that many people now follow the modern 'trend' of atheism and death is the end, scjence explains everything and there is no real 'meaning' to life. I would wonder if, again, this is a mode of thinking that we have forced ourselves into and, like Dawkins and the likes, would be unwilling to budge from that standpoint. I'm no great mind but I wonder if the magic of existence has been drained out of us when we close doors to a possibilty of some real 'meaning' to life. Personally, I would echo what Black Shepherd said earlier and stress the humility the reading of the likes of Nietzsche has brought to my life. Far from.using 'reads' as a tool to beat people with, it has allowed me both to focus out and view the gigantic and mostly chaotic complexity which surrounds me whilst on a personal level understanding the infinite complexities that make up my own person and every person in the world. If I was prone to Catholicism I might say we are all god's children, and outside of that, the 'be cool to everyone' idea echoed previously is a good way to put it.


And yet,  that's my humble little truppence worth of an idea. I would say by the mere fact that you're asking yourself about the meaning of life shows that you are at the very least trying to do something with the cards that you have been dealt. All that said, this idea of betterment, and working towards an 'ultimate goal' sounds very utopian/Christian to me. Advancing technology, going to the stars etc, again is one way of looking at the world and comes from a very Western approach to life. But I find myself going around in circles here, and that is probably the danger of overthinking things. Maybe it's best just to nail your colours to the mast and work as best as you can within that 'limited' space of your life...questions are endless, I find myself rambling, time for a poo.

[Giggles]

The Offspring's "Meaning of Life" is a great opener for a cracker of an album.

[Scáthach]

Think about your death. Would you in your final moments have regret? Would you have unfulfilled desires? How do you think your loved ones will remember you? Or even friends and acquaintances? I'm not sure that this will invest more meaning in your life, but may help to identify changes you may like to make. Alternatively, if it's these very things that are a source of stress, learn to meditate, it won't make you happy, but it's useful for slowing the minds hamster wheel.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Taking it in a bit of a different direction, I've been struck in the last four months of parenthood by how spontaneous a reaction to existence laughter is. Crying due to some form of discontent and laughter are the two principal forms of expression of our little lad so far. Fits pretty well with the absurdity of life really, just gotta make sure he doesn't get brainwashed into taking the discontent bit too seriously, cos you gotta laugh at it all otherwise one'd just be a moany bastard!

[Pedrito]

The meaning of life is that we are all fucked.

@McLove...book yourself a trip to somewhere warm this winter. The dark nights and too much black metal might be taking their toll on you. A nice happy ending in some seedy Thai massage parlour followed by a week lying under a palm tree works wonders so I'm led to believe