The existentialist philosophy of the 20th century takes as a primary starting point the acknowledgment of the inherent meaninglessness of existence. With the death of god and with him the immortal soul went any notion of a transcendental source or grounding of meaning. Indeed there seems to be no identifiable external source of meaning. Far from being problematic, I would argue, this is an ideal situation. An external source for meaning (God or the ambient culture) might imply certain constraints that we might deem to be unfavorable. The point is that any prospective source of meaning must be judged by our own lights and deemed worthy of acceptance by us only to the extent that it suits our nature. A meaningful life is a life filled with things that are meaningful to us; meaningful as determined by our own standards, judged by our own light, suitable for our own natures.
Problems arise, it seems to me, when we fail to recognize the active role we have in judging and accepting what is meaningful to us and integrating these meaningful things into our lives. We tend to assume that meaning is something that happens to us, something we are fortunate enough to find ourselves having at any particular moment or we are not.
Moreover we tend to passively accept the standards of meaning offered up by our surrounding culture. A meaningful life is a life where you are, say, popular or good looking or own a lot of stuff, or are the best at something a lot of people are interested in. The problem is that these standards of meaning, because they are widely accepted, are mistakenly assumed to be the only standards that matter. It fact they happen to be merely the standards by which modern consumer culture determines a meaningful life. Perhaps these standards are suitable for some people, but they are clearly not for everyone. Some very good looking, successful people have lived miserable lives, lives lived under someone else's standards of meaning. Most likely they never thought about what standards of meaning they were subjecting themselves to and they never thought about what standards would better suit them, or else they never had the courage to reject popularly held standards of meaning and forge something better, more substanitive to live by.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
A note to readers.
Hello and welcome to my blog.
There is no real structure or theme to what will be posted here. This is merely a forum for me to get down and think out some things that I happen to find interesting. The process of writing things out helps to clarify certain ideas and hopefully uncover and bring to light some heretofore unnoticed assumptions. Comments are welcome since I believe inquiry is most effective when is an interpersonal pursuit.
We are always privy to just a limited amount of information about the world in which we live. What information we take in shapes our model of the world, or worldview. I say "take in" because our store of beliefs is not composed just of information we actively seek. In fact only a small fraction of what we take to be true is the product of direct personal investigation. Most all of what we know we have assimilated from our surrounding cultural environment. We were either taught these things from childhood or we tacitly assume these things to be true because everyone in our cultural milieu takes these things to be true. This information composes our worldview. All of us have, and have to have, a worldview. Clearly what we believe to be true about the world in which we live, including what we believe to be true about ourselves, about what kind of beings we are, profoundly effects what we do, what we value and how we feel about ourselves. My contention is that ones worldview, functioning as it does as a model of the actual world, is better (better in several ways) if it is more accurate.
So the main purpose of this blog for me is to have a means by which to flesh out my own worldview, to expose lurking assumptions, to add nuance where needed, to expose prevailing views within the culture to need criticism and to examine and integrate new information relevant to all this. I hope anyone reading this will find it interesting, thought provoking (provoking enough to comment) and offensive (more on the importance of being offended in a later post.) Thanks.
There is no real structure or theme to what will be posted here. This is merely a forum for me to get down and think out some things that I happen to find interesting. The process of writing things out helps to clarify certain ideas and hopefully uncover and bring to light some heretofore unnoticed assumptions. Comments are welcome since I believe inquiry is most effective when is an interpersonal pursuit.
We are always privy to just a limited amount of information about the world in which we live. What information we take in shapes our model of the world, or worldview. I say "take in" because our store of beliefs is not composed just of information we actively seek. In fact only a small fraction of what we take to be true is the product of direct personal investigation. Most all of what we know we have assimilated from our surrounding cultural environment. We were either taught these things from childhood or we tacitly assume these things to be true because everyone in our cultural milieu takes these things to be true. This information composes our worldview. All of us have, and have to have, a worldview. Clearly what we believe to be true about the world in which we live, including what we believe to be true about ourselves, about what kind of beings we are, profoundly effects what we do, what we value and how we feel about ourselves. My contention is that ones worldview, functioning as it does as a model of the actual world, is better (better in several ways) if it is more accurate.
So the main purpose of this blog for me is to have a means by which to flesh out my own worldview, to expose lurking assumptions, to add nuance where needed, to expose prevailing views within the culture to need criticism and to examine and integrate new information relevant to all this. I hope anyone reading this will find it interesting, thought provoking (provoking enough to comment) and offensive (more on the importance of being offended in a later post.) Thanks.
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