Thinking About Meaning While Weeding the Garden

22 Wednesday Mar 2023

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The extraordinary bouts of rain to fall upon California has led to an extraordinary bounty of weeds forcing themselves about the plants in my yard. Today, in a respite between showers, I was freeing a decorative plant from the infestation of some noxious greenery. And as one does, I thought of how the weed worked like cancer, sucking up the nutrients and water meant for the plant I desired.

This led me to consider the deep ecological thinking that humanity is like a weed or cancer upon the earth. Thus, humanity needs to be culled – or perhaps even abrogated for the good earth.

From that I thought: What is the harm which comes to the earth if human beings are well but some other life on earth is not? Whatever answer I come to is the answer of a human being. If l land some pagan ecology and think that “life” itself is what matters, and human beings are merely the froth of this wave, it is still a human being who has this thought. No grass or caterpillar or goose is worried about this metaphysical existential problem.

The meaning exists in the human mind.

This leads to an interesting quandary for those make humanity the culprit, the cancer upon the globe.

Let us assume an utterly materialistic understanding of nature, by this I mean whatever forces there may be within the universe, the universe is the boundary of reality. There are molecules in motion.

In such a universe, meaning a useful fiction of the human mind; but “meaning” has no existence independent of the human mind. We cannot go exploring through the universe and find meaning somewhere. Meaning has no existence beyond a human being thinking, “This has meaning.”

If this so, destroying human beings would destroy the tenuous meaning which could exist. It would also “mean” that the world was meaningless. There is no moral difference between gushing mercury into an oyster bed and tending to a rose or rescuing a baby from a fire. Some person may make some sort of judgment about one thing or the other, but the moral value would extend no further than the judgment. Meaning is a function of human intelligence.

Right or wrong would simply be a majority opinion.

And if human beings were all gone, the world would be meaningless. Racoons hunting crayfish might still happen, but it would have no moral value: that moral value could only come from human beings.

The thought that well, life will go and perhaps better without us, is merely a thought of a human being. But the value of “life” and “better” and whatnot do not exist. That is a nonsense statement neither true nor false. It is a vapor which would disappear without a human being to think it.

The other possibility is that there is some meaning independent of the human mind. For such an abstraction to be exist, it would necessarily exist in another mind. Meaning is a kind of way an intelligence thinks about an event. For meaning to something other than an incident abstraction of human beings, but to a fact; meaning must be grounded in something other than human beings thinking of it.

What sort of mind would suffice to ground meaning as an objective fact?

Thomas Hardy On a Fine Morning

19 Friday Jun 2020

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joy, Literature, Meaning, poem, Poetry, Thomas Hardy

How can one have comfort in an impersonal accidental universe? This was a great problem for Hardy. The world will simply calmly destroy us.

So he asks the question where can I find solace?

It can’t be from our actual experience:

Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

There is just an accident a surprise which permits him to see grey appear to be gold. Even shadows are turning to sun.

Thus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.

That last line is the key: I am somehow meaningful. The earth is meant for human life.

This is the point where Hardy differs from Lewis. That surprise of joy led Hardy to have a moments accident – a dream. For Lewis the surprise of joy requires an explanation: it can’t be grounded in life experience which is suffering. Where then?

Misery requires no explanation of life is a bare cosmic accident: why should the ends meet? Darwin only requires existence not the good true or beautiful: those have no anchor in a world of chance. Beauty is purposeful, ordered.

Hardy can’t give a better explanation for his morning than “dream.”

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.2 (You are “sick” should ask if life is meaningful.)

09 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Freud, Uncategorized

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Culture, Freud, Meaning, religion, Superego, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The prior post in this series may be found here.

Rieff, pp. 23-27

There are two interrelated issues which run through this section of his discussion of Freud. The two issues are not unrelated, but they are also not coterminous. One issue concerns the function of culture vis-à-vis impulse (the inherent desires of the human being). These two, the Superego and Id, are in conflict with one-another.

In wildly simplified terms, the ego is the negotiation and expression of this conflict. Freud’s work was to make plain the nature of this conflict and allow the individual who had obtained “maturity” (Rieff’s term) was to become aware of this conflict and to set the relationship between the two oneself: “Maturity, according to Freud, lay in the trained capacity to keep the negotiations from breaking down.” (24)

There is a related issue concerning, culture, religion and the superego. The superego functions as the cultural representative. The requirements and limitations of the culture become effective in the individual. The tools developed by Freud permit the individual to keep these tools at a distance.

It is for this reason, the “modern intellectuals” (26) find Freud appealing. His tools provide one a way to read and thence to disarm the culture’s effect upon the individual. Although not discussed here, this explains why Freud was so valuable in the literature departments in cultural criticism because his critique – even if not considered scientifically valid as a psychology – was practically valuable as a means of putting cultural limits at bay.

Essentially, one could critique moral standards as merely archaic residue of an earlier commonly held superego.

Concept of culture is tightly related to the concept of religion in this thinking. Adherence to cultural understanding permitted one to have “meaning.” But Freudian analysis sidesteps this issue and simply does not permit the question of “meaning” to arise. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. This is the religious question.

Freud held that to ask the question concerning “the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.” (27)

Some Notes What a Narrative “Means” (with Help From Euripides)

15 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Hermeneutics, Literature, Uncategorized

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Euripides, Greek Poetry, Hecuba, hermeneutics, Meaning, Narrative

Hecuba and Polyxena by Merry-Joseph Blondell

We can understand what a work of nonfiction “means”: the words in the text refer to some objective (typically) event in the physical world. A book on President Grant refers back to the life of President Grant.

When it comes to non-fiction, the question of “meaning” because more difficult: A play or poem or story does not express “meaning” in the same manner. Sometimes the “meaning” of a text is merely the entertainment the text provides.

Another type of “meaning” comes from a text which seeks to bring the reader to a new understanding of the world. There are always exceptions, but typically “bad” writing tells the reader plainly what to think. Most writers who attempt this work may try to “show and not tell” the reader what to think will handle it poorly.

But when a towering master performs this work it is a thing of beauty. The effectiveness of the meaning comes from its ability to speak and persuade. Here is an example of brilliance in Euripides’ play Hecuba.

It would be easy to get lost in the names, so I’ll do my best to be clear.

The first thing you must know, is that the original audience for Euripides play were Greeks. The play itself concern the exploits of the great heroes and the great war of Greek of imagination: In the dim past the Greeks came to war against City of Troy as revenge for taking Helen from a Greek king. (How and why this took place is another story.)

You need to know that this story would be the equivalent of the Revolution and the Civil War and the World Wars all rolled into one. The men in this story are more than just George Washington or Abraham Lincoln; they are heroes, mythic figures, nearly divine.

The story Hecuba begins after the Greeks have sacked Troy. The king of Troy had sent his son to another kingdom with a treasure to keep him safe should Troy fall. Yet when the king of Thrace heard that Troy fell, he murdered his friend’s son to take the gold and treasure. The play beings with the ghost of the son telling what had happened to him, washed up on the shore, unburied (a horror to the Greeks).

Hecuba was the queen of Troy, now reduced to slavery is the moral and emotional center of the story. The audience hears from her what it is to be reduced and enslaved and in fear for her family. The natural sympathy of the story is thus skillfully built-up throw the eyes of the enemy in the greatest war in Greek history.

The tension increases when the ghost of Achilles appears above his tomb and demands the sacrifice of Hebuca’s daughter, the princess of Troy, Polyxena. It would be hard to overstate the greatness of Achilles in Greek imagination: Alexandra the Great thought himself in some way the second Achilles.

Thus, their greatest hero demanded the murder of an enslaved princess.

The message that Polyxena would be killed was brought to Hecuba by Odysseus. Again the space for Odysseus is difficult to explain. He is the hero of the second-half of the Greek “Bible” (if you will), the Odyssey. He is an arch-type of all Western Culture.

The tension is raised here, because Hecuba had spared Odysseus’s life during the time of the war. He is depicted as a groveling, dishonest, manipulative man who said anything just to stay alive. As he puts it, “Word-words full many I found to escape death.”

It is this groveling, ungrateful wretch who is the hero of the Greeks seeking the murder of a young woman to appease the ghost of an even greater hero.

As we hear this scene, it comes to us through the perspective of Hecuba: the woman who home has been destroyed by an invading army, who family has been destroyed now sees a liar come to drag her daughter off to murder.

At this point, Euripides has made the enemies of Greek imagination sympathetic, and the heroes of Greek thought wretched and vicious.

The punch-line of this scene comes when Odysseus calls Hecuba a “Barbarian” (the height of Greek insults), because she is unwilling to pay homage to the dead.

Upon this insult, the Chorus, who are the moral conscience of the play respond, “Woe What a curse is thralldom’s nature.” Hecuba and Polyxena are “enduring wrong” and are “overborne” by the “strong constraint” of their captors.

Euripides didn’t say in blunt terms, destroying kingdoms, stealing women and sacrificing captives to barbaric.

Rather, by giving voice to the pain and fear of the “enemy” and showing the callous barbarism of the “heroes” he more effectively overturns a cheap chauvinism in his audience.

The “meaning” of the text is not some bare proposition (killing other human beings is generally bad). Rather, the meaning is reversal of expectation the shock of heroes failing, the sorrow for the enemy. The meaning of the story is the transformation of perspective.

One could repeat a proposition and even understand it’s cognitive content without being transformed. But cry for the enemy and feel shock for the hero is different than the bare proposition. One can know and not be changed; but that would not be the “meaning” of this play. The meaning is the movement of the human heart.

Why Would a European Teenage Girl Join ISIS?

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Thesis

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Culture, Existentialism, ISIS, Meaning, Teenagers, Thesis, Vanity

Because, for all the awesome social services and consumer goods it can offer, Europe has become incapable of endowing the lives of its citizens, Muslim or not, with meaning. A generation of young European Muslims are giving up their relatively easy lives in Malmö, Marseilles, and Manchester for the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, because Europe is devoid of values worth living—or dying—for. They are leaving for the same reason that Europe’s Jews are moving to Israel: Strength and a sense of purpose can be found elsewhere, whether it’s ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khameni, or the IDF.

Human beings cannot live long without a semblance of purpose

Are You An Anthropocentrist?

13 Wednesday May 2015

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animal altruism, animal grief, animal stereotypes, animals compared to humans, anthropocentrism, deep ecology, human superiority, Meaning, nature, non-human awareness, non-human communication, non-human math, non-human spirituality, non-human tool use, perspective, Science, species stereotypes, truth

[Without further coment]:

Ample evidence that we humans are not superior to all other living beings. Instead we might recognize other creatures are “gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

http://lauragraceweldon.com/2014/11/05/are-you-an-anthropocentrist/

Richard Baxter, Directions to the Unconverted: God Created

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Richard Baxter

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Apologetics, Christian Directory, Creation, Evangelism, Evil, Meaning, Presuppositions, Richard Baxter, Unconverted

Richard Baxter continues his directions respecting the unconverted. In the fourth point, Baxter stated that he will “Supposed, therefore, there thou dost confess there is a God ….If thou wilt deny there is a God, thou must deny that thou art a man, and that there is any man, or any being.”

From the place of presupposition, There is a God, Baxter reasons. First, God must be the Creator. If God is not the Creator, then he does not deserve the title of God:

For he is not God, if he be not the Creator, and therefore our Owner, our Rule, and Benefactor, our absolute Lord, our most righteous Governor, and our most loving Father, or Benefactor.

Baxter’s point matters a great deal: The demands made by God stem from the status of Creator. A god who did not create us is a god who can make no demand upon us beyond, I’m bigger than you. Indeed, much complaint about God, as depicted in the Bible, is that he is a bully.

The complaint of a bully is a complaint that one has no right to make such demands. Consider: If a police officer gives someone a ticket for running a red light, it is not the act of a bully. The state has legitimate authority for health and safety. But if the police officer stops motorists and demands that they give him personally $20, he is being a bully. He is simply using his power to abuse others. A robber is just a bully writ large.

When people complain of God’s demands, they essentially complain that he is a bully. But in making the bully argument, they are actually stating, (1) God has no right to make such a demand. (2) I don’t like his demand. Both elements are necessary, because few people complain that God hates murder. However, they do complain when God forbids some specific act.

The complaint against God only arises when one’s desire has been crossed. At that point, the complaint will issue, God has no right! (That is really the thrust of the argument concerning evil: God has not right to judge me! He is worse than I am.) Baxter will drive home the point of God’s right by first noting establishes, God is the Creator.

As Creator, God establishes meaning in the most fundamental aspect: If God did not create, the concept of meaning in creation would be gibberish: there would be no creation. If God did create, then meaning is something built into creation. As Creator, God establishes meaning, and hence morality and all other aspects of meaning.

In fact, the existence of moral facts (e.g., the Holocaust was evil) is a basic proof of God’s existence. (If God does not exist, then one may state his strong dislike of murder, but to argue that it is evil is silly: unless by the word one merely means, I really strongly and passionately dislike it. Or one may mean, It is a fundamentally bad idea – I might get killed. But one cannot really mean “evil.” Such Humpty-Dumpty refashioning of words get us very little. If we keep up this nonsense, we’ll have no conversation at all.)

A Creator God is a God who establishes meaning, this is right and that is wrong – which also necessitates a concept of order. Thus, to obtain the end of “liberation” one must jettison God, which means throwing out meaning:

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.

Aldus Huxley, Ends and Means (1946), 272. A copy of the work may be found here: http://www.archive.org/stream/endsandmeans035237mbp/endsandmeans035237mbp_djvu.txt

Rather than meaning, there is “preference”. The preference of God for X is no better than my preference for Y, albeit, God might have a bigger hammer and so God may cow my desire.

Thus, Baxter rightly notes that the conversation cannot get going unless we both begin with a God who created. Paul, proceeds from this point in Romans. He notes the wrath of God revealed against the suppression of the truth. Note how his argument concerning the Gospel comes anchored in God creates:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. Romans 1:18–25 (ESV)