The Meaninglessness of Meaning
July 25, 2015 at 5:08 pm
(This post was last modified: July 25, 2015 at 5:12 pm by Mudhammam.)
What does "meaning" mean to you? From whence does "meaning" spring into being - or does it even exist at all? Is it wholly subjective, akin to the mystical experience, involving the usage of terms that only take on significance for the subject, and which in effect only describe something - a sense - about the world in a most superficial manner?
Essentially, from an "objective" standpoint, it would seem that no "state of affairs" in the world has any meaning. Consider the happenstance asteroid that collides with the moon; a worm that gets ravished by a bird; the love that a human feels for his or her offspring. We assign meaning, to a higher or lesser degree, to a variety of objects, believing that the very act of valuing something - that is, possessing strong feelings of pleasure towards it that include aims of temporarily "preserving" its illusory equilibrium - confers upon it meaningful attributes, or a quality of meaningfulness. But is this more than a linguistic trick that in actuality serves only to describe the affections, or chemical changes, that such objects cause in our bodies and our brains - to our center of consciousness, that socially and psychologically construed identity - our "selves"? Does such a chemical change, not fundamentally unlike the physical alterations that occur when water is heated to boil or cooled to freeze, justify our rationalization and usage of terms like value and meaning?
I cannot help but consider that, objectively speaking, we - illusory selves - are but a meaningless "state of affairs," or physical processes, like the asteroid hurling through space, like the worm sacrificing itself for the sustenance of the bird, yet differing in one aspect, its importance not yet properly measured or understood - we are capable of creating the delusion in which "I" have a "meaningful" existence. Is this feature a possible buttress to the seemingly inevitable logical conclusion of physicalism that "'objectively speaking,' no state of affairs possesses 'intrinsic' value or meaning"? For perhaps such powers of creation do reveal physical processes imbued with meaning - even if they are processes that exclusively reveal themselves in the abstract - and it is in the abstract that meaning is not meaningless . . . but what does "existence in the abstract" mean in the context of objectivity?
Essentially, from an "objective" standpoint, it would seem that no "state of affairs" in the world has any meaning. Consider the happenstance asteroid that collides with the moon; a worm that gets ravished by a bird; the love that a human feels for his or her offspring. We assign meaning, to a higher or lesser degree, to a variety of objects, believing that the very act of valuing something - that is, possessing strong feelings of pleasure towards it that include aims of temporarily "preserving" its illusory equilibrium - confers upon it meaningful attributes, or a quality of meaningfulness. But is this more than a linguistic trick that in actuality serves only to describe the affections, or chemical changes, that such objects cause in our bodies and our brains - to our center of consciousness, that socially and psychologically construed identity - our "selves"? Does such a chemical change, not fundamentally unlike the physical alterations that occur when water is heated to boil or cooled to freeze, justify our rationalization and usage of terms like value and meaning?
I cannot help but consider that, objectively speaking, we - illusory selves - are but a meaningless "state of affairs," or physical processes, like the asteroid hurling through space, like the worm sacrificing itself for the sustenance of the bird, yet differing in one aspect, its importance not yet properly measured or understood - we are capable of creating the delusion in which "I" have a "meaningful" existence. Is this feature a possible buttress to the seemingly inevitable logical conclusion of physicalism that "'objectively speaking,' no state of affairs possesses 'intrinsic' value or meaning"? For perhaps such powers of creation do reveal physical processes imbued with meaning - even if they are processes that exclusively reveal themselves in the abstract - and it is in the abstract that meaning is not meaningless . . . but what does "existence in the abstract" mean in the context of objectivity?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
