dicknectar
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DickNectar is in the house
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4 years ago
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About Me
Username:
dicknectar
Gender:
Male
Body Type:
Ample
Ethnicity:
Caucasian
Hair:
Black
Eyes:
Green
Weight:
280 pounds
Height:
74 inches
Age:
60
City:
Weatherford, Texas
Country:
United States
Sexual Preference:
Straight
Drink:
Occasional
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Meaning of Life:
One part of the field on life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of life's meaning (and of significance, importance, and other synonyms). A large majority of those writing on life's meaning deem talk of it centrally to indicate a positive final value that an individual's life can exhibit. So, few believe either that a meaningful life is a neutral quality or that what is of key interest is the meaning of all biological life or of the human species. Most ultimately want to know whether and how the existence of one of us over time has meaning, a certain property that is desirable for its own sake.
Beyond drawing the distinction between the life of an individual and that of a group, there has been very little discussion of life as the bearer of meaning. For instance, is the individual's life best understood biologically (qua human) or not (person) (Flanagan 1996)? And if an individual is loved from afar, can it affect the meaningfulness of her life (Brogaard and Smith 2005, 449)?
Returning to topics on which there is consensus, most writing on meaning believe that it comes in degrees such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others (perhaps contra Britton 1969, 192). Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people's lives are less meaningful than others, or even meaningless, and still maintain that people have an equal moral status. Consider a consequentialist view according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life (cf. Railton 1984), or a Kantian view that says that people have an intrinsic worth in virtue of their capacity for autonomous choices, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity (Nozick 1974, ch. 3). On both views, morality could counsel an agent to help people with relatively meaningless lives, at least if the condition is not of their choosing.
Another uncontroversial element of the sense of meaningfulness is that it connotes a good that is conceptually distinct from happiness or rightness. First, to ask whether someone's life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is happy or well off. A life in an experience or virtual reality machine could conceivably be happy but is not a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness, and, furthermore, one's life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one's welfare, e.g., by helping others at the expense of oneself. Second, asking whether a person's existence is significant is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there seem to be ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with morality, for instance making a scientific discovery. Of course, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if (or even because) it were immoral or unhappy, particularly given Aristotelian conceptions of these disvalues. However, that is to posit a synthetic relationship between the concepts, and is far from indicating that speaking of meaning in life is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding welfare or morality, which is what I am denying here. My point is that the question of what makes a life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the question of what makes a life well off or morally upright, even if it turns out that the best answer to the question of meaning appeals to an answer to one of these other evaluative questions.
If talk about meaning in life is not by definition talk about welfare or morality, then what is it about? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One answer is that a meaningful life is one that by definition has achieved choice-worthy purposes (Nielsen 1964) or involves satisfaction upon having done so (Wohlgennant 1981). However, this analysis seems too broad for being unable to distinguish the concept of a meaningful life from that of a moral life, which could equally involve attaining worthwhile ends and feeling good upon doing so. We seem to need an account of which purposes are relevant to meaning, with some suggesting they are purposes that not only have a positive value, but also render a life coherent (Markus 2003), make it intelligible (Thomson 2003, 8-13), or transcend one's animal nature (Levy 2005), all of which connote something different from morality and also happiness.
Now, it might be that a focus on any kind of purpose is too narrow for ruling out the logical possibility that meaning could inhere in certain actions, experiences, states, or relationships that have not been adopted as ends and willed and that perhaps even could not be, e.g., being an immortal offshoot of an unconscious, spiritual force that grounds the physical universe, as in Hinduism. In addition, the above purpose-based analyses exclude as not being about life's meaning some of the most widely read texts that purport to be about it, namely, Jean-Paul Sartre's (1948) existentialist account of meaning being constituted by whatever one chooses, and Richard Taylor's (1970, ch. 18) discussion of Sisyphus being able to acquire meaning in his life merely by having his strongest desires satisfied. These are prima facie accounts of meaning in life, but do not necessarily involve the attainment of purposes that foster coherence, intelligibility or transcendence.
The latter problem also faces the alternative suggestion that talk of life's meaning is not necessarily about purposes, but is rather just a matter of referring to goods that are qualitatively superior, worthy of love and devotion, and appropriately awed (Taylor 1989, ch. 1). It is implausible to think that whatever choices one ends up making or whichever desires one happens to rank highly fit these criteria.
Although relatively few have addressed the question of whether there exists a single, primary sense of life's meaning, the inability to find one so far might suggest that none exists. In that case, it could be that the field is united in virtue of addressing certain overlapping but not equivalent ideas that have family resemblances (Metz 2001). Perhaps when one of us speaks of meaning in life, we have in mind one of these ideas: certain conditions that are worthy of great pride or admiration, values that warrant devotion and love, qualities that make a life intelligible, or ends apart from subjective satisfaction and moral duty that are the most choice-worthy.
As the field reflects more on the sense of life's meaning, it should try to ascertain whether there is more unity to it than mere family resemblance. And when doing so it should be careful to differentiate the concept of life's meaning from other, closely related ideas. For instance, the concept of a worthwhile life is not identical to that of a meaningful one (Baier 1997, ch. 5). One would not be conceptually confused to claim that a meaningless life full of animal pleasures is most (or even alone) worth living. Furthermore, talk of a meaningless life does not simply connote the concept of an absurd (Nagel 1970; Feinberg 1980), unreasonable (Baier 1997, ch. 5), futile (Trisel 2002), or wasted (Kamm 2003, 210-14) life.
Fortunately the field does not need an extremely precise analysis of the concept of life's meaning (or definition of the phrase life's meaning) in order to make progress on the substantive question of what life's meaning is. Knowing that meaningfulness analytically concerns a variable and gradient final good in a person's life that is conceptually distinct from happiness, rightness, and worthwhileness provides a certain amount of common ground. The rest of this discussion addresses attempts to theoretically capture the nature of this good.
Favorite Songs:
Pretty much anything
Favorite Movies:
Pretty long list
Best Reason to Get to Know Me:
I'm a good guy
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clintss
i dont treaten no one dude unless they deserve it and the best thing u can do i mind your own fkn buissnes and im asking you as a freind.....
RidinDeep
Thanks for being so sweet to me =)
XO.
Erin
WonderlandSah
THERE WERE ERRORS FOUND IN THIS POST: You have used a tag that is not allowed. Pair tag <3333> was not closed.
KristyCalisto
Whoa dude- long profile, kick ass name! lol!