The meaning of life

[Pedrito]

This is a great thread. My thoughts on it are more or less interspersed here and there. It's the biggest question of them all and I don't think humankind is anywhere close  to coming up with an answer. I kinda hope it's revealed when we return to the cosmos, in death.  "Meaning" is such a big word and it reminds me of Carl Sagan's speech about the speck of dust that is Earth.  We are pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things, finding meaning is essentially futile, so for now, fulfillment is possibly the highest aspiration we should be seeking. Personal fulfillment but also seeking to have led a life of net gain once we reach the end.

I'm on the same page with you there..not sure we're anywhere near a true understanding of the possibilities out in the world, universe or even internally. Nietzsche, who is a fuking savage, had a great little point in one paragraph, where he talked about Consciousness being the LAST development in the human body/being..(my terminology/vocab might be a bit off). Basically, our eyes developed, our hands, we learned to walk standing up, and (I think it's Consciousness is the word he uses) is the most recent addition in our evolutionary scale. It's a new addition, and as a result, how can we be so cocksure of ourselves. Something along those lines..Oul Friedrich tends to floor you at times. Black Shepherd is the man for Nietzsche in fairness, I wouldn't claim to any expertise on the subject.

[Emphyrio]

This is a great thread. My thoughts on it are more or less interspersed here and there. It's the biggest question of them all and I don't think humankind is anywhere close  to coming up with an answer. I kinda hope it's revealed when we return to the cosmos, in death.  "Meaning" is such a big word and it reminds me of Carl Sagan's speech about the speck of dust that is Earth.  We are pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things, finding meaning is essentially futile, so for now, fulfillment is possibly the highest aspiration we should be seeking. Personal fulfillment but also seeking to have led a life of net gain once we reach the end.

I'm on the same page with you there..not sure we're anywhere near a true understanding of the possibilities out in the world, universe or even internally. Nietzsche, who is a fuking savage, had a great little point in one paragraph, where he talked about Consciousness being the LAST development in the human body/being..(my terminology/vocab might be a bit off). Basically, our eyes developed, our hands, we learned to walk standing up, and (I think it's Consciousness is the word he uses) is the most recent addition in our evolutionary scale. It's a new addition, and as a result, how can we be so cocksure of ourselves. Something along those lines..Oul Friedrich tends to floor you at times. Black Shepherd is the man for Nietzsche in fairness, I wouldn't claim to any expertise on the subject.

Aye, we touched on him in college and I found him and Kierkegaard (?) very interesting. I've been meaning to get back into that stuff again. That said, I've been saying that for almost 15 years.

[Eoin McLove]

I've a heap of new books on front of me but the boul Nietzsche is on the shopping list. I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra a couple of years ago and it was interesting.

[Pedrito]

Tough book to rwad without guidance. Try Human all too hunan or The Gay Science

[Bigmac]

What guidance would you suggest to accompany it?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra has been sitting on my bedside book pile for a while. I've had a burgeoning interest in both him and Jung recently, but my dipping of the toe into both hasn't gone past a few videos, and some light reading.

I've found the Academy of Ideas channel to be great introductions to both, as well as a number of other philosophers. I'd imagine you've already encountered that stuff though.

[Grim Reality]

I've dabbled in and out of philosophical reading for years. Am certainly no expert on it. Most of it melts my head and I struggle to finish hefty tomes. But I found Thus Spake Zarathustra very engaging. The fact there is a sort of linear narrative helps. It's hard to explain but I loved it in the same way I love certain moments in black metal music. It's embued with some current of 'truth', where the clouds part or everything aligns and things just seem 'right'. Transmits meaning greater than the sum of its parts. Its also a literary masterpiece with a beautiful tone and pace and that is probably its greatest attraction for me.

In contrast I found Beyond Good And Evil tough to pick up enjoy at length.

Also been enjoying Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representation on the 200th anniversary of its release. The actual book itself has been gathering dust on my shelf for yonks but an article in the magazine Philosophy Now has broken it down and made it a bit more understandable for this crude numbskull 

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Thus Spoke is readable (though maybe not readable enough to get the casual reader to the end) in the sense that, as Grim Reality says, it's written in a kind of scriptural narrative way which allows you to progress smoothly through (or in many cases over) extremely complicated and dense ideas without getting stuck. So you can read it as a piece of writing and certainly enjoy it like that. But to read it as a work of philosophy, I think it's actually more complex than any of his other works, and for exactly the same reason; because his thought is presented in it in images, allegories and metaphors, and there's no straight path to the bottom of those, especially since it's hard to tell when you've reached the actual bottom and not, for example, just the lid of a hidden compartment. There are more Nietzsche afficionados out there banging on such lids and repeating, "Look - bang, bang - see? It's the bottom - bang, bang - it's obvious!" than there are those who suspend judgement. And when you try to tell these afficionados otherwise... they blink! This "getting to the bottom" challenge is a big enough obstacle in all of his mid- to late-period writings, but in Zarathustra especially so. It would take literally a miracle for anybody to understand his philosophy on the basis of Zarathustra alone. All the above taken together is why he sub-titled it "a book for everyone [easy to read] and no one [virtually impossible to get to the bottom of]"

I'd agree with Pedrito; The Gay Science or Human, All Too Human first.

And if you're digging Schopenhauer at the moment, no better time to read Nietzsche's Untimely Meditation on him; "Schopenhauer educator". Great stuff from the early period.

[Bigmac]

Cheers, appreciate the insight.

I think I may give it a read now, go back through some of his other works, then read Thus Spoke again to see how my perception may or may not have developed.

I have such a backlog of things to get through reading wise, that I'm either truly embracing the thirst to find some meaning to life through topics such as these, or so fucking confused that I'm grasping at everything and anything to see if it sticks.

It sometimes feels like a very fine line.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Just make sure you have a laugh with it, that's what Zarathustra would tell you

[Bigmac]

Zarathustra seems like a sound lad.

[Pedrito]

I'm reading this Jung book at the moment and it seens he may have been illegitimately related to Goethe. He also went to Basel university and talks at great length about Nietzsche whom he says was a complete outcast academically speaking in Basel where it was very difficult to find anyone who had heard of him or his writing. The fame seens to have arrived a lot later. What's really interesting is when Jung starts talking about symbols and behins to investigate alchemy and gnkstic writings etc. He dismissed it all until he began to see a type of symbolic language being used, which he also finds in Faust and Zarathustra...incredible layers of meaning according to him, I belive he wrote a massive book on Zarathustra and Faust is constantly referred to. This rolls into Taoism and all sorts of shit that I have no fucking clue about, but which led to many of his great 'discoveries' such as the subconscious, collective unconscious, synchronicity, archtypes etc which he says is the symbolic language needed to approach Zarathustra. Again, I could be misrepresenting the above with my terminology. It's a belter of a read though.

[Pedrito]

Another book I'm slowly farting throjgh is Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Basically goes back pre-Greece and gives you a run down of every philosopher and movement up to just after WW2, Chapter by chapter. For a dope like me, whose sex education was a 2 hour run through by a nun in 6th class and whose childhood was spent worrying that the devil was in the corner of the room, raised on piseógs and all that wonderful Irish madness, it's great to have some structure put on the 'why' of things. 'Why' we think certain ways etc. The Greek origins of our way of thinking..loads of 'oh fuck, ahhh now I see' moments. Loads of 'meanings' to life explored.

[Scáthach]

Russell's a History of Western Philosophy should be mandatory in school. I had a Christian brother in primary and spent a long time in the morning praying and singing hymns while he murdered a violin.(What a waste of time)  But yeah, a history is so readable, logical and enjoyable, despite its size.
I think humanity's greatest gift is creativity, from cooking to high art and anything related. The ability to communicate such through words, symbols and sounds is practical magick.
I am unfortunately quite the pessimist, and see the late 19th and early 20th century as the last flowering of humanity's spiritual and artistic spirit that could still be called beautiful. This in spite of the mechanised slaughter of war that would characterise much of the 20th century.
Academic philosophy of the present seems resigned to its epistemological crisis. It now seems like an equation to be solved for the amusement of other academics.
How did the discipline of philosophy go from asking what is good and how do we live a good life, to "let's mash Hegel and communism together and use that to analyse the movies of Hitchcock"?
Thankfully Nietzsche is still a valid antidote to existential emptiness, especially in the realm of art, ethics and meaning.

[Eoin McLove]

Does art and culture so to speak hold up without philosophy or is it just a form of philosophy? Without reading the works of the philosophers, what other routes to meaning are possible? I think it's interesting and predictable that philosophy will be high on the list when discussing the meaning of life (the question is itself philosophical) but it is surely just one route to meaning. 

[Scáthach]

Tricky one to answer, my best guess is each influences the other. Is time and distance from, and the success of an idea what qualifies it as formal philosophy? Western philosophy is so ingrained in our language that it's hard to escape it's influence. Does it's study enrich your life? I would have to say yes.
I feel the modern scientific view can leave out quality or experience from its descriptions. For example, we can name the frequencies in a melody, and map out tempo and show that info as sheet music. We know what parts of the anatomy are required for hearing the music. We can use mri or CT scans to show brain activity when listening to the music. But we can't really say why we prefer one song to another, why a particular section of the song makes us clench our jaw, double bass drum with our feet etc. We just know we fuckin love it. (BTW, this is your brain on music by Daniel Levitin is a great read, maybe a good follow up to the Pinker book you mentioned earlier)