On the feeling that life is meaningful

Time for Monday morning philosophizing!

Here's Sarah Perry (that is, the antinatalist* Sarah Perry, not the novelist Sarah Perry), writing in Every Cradle Is a Grave, making a point worth consideration about the role one's concept of "the meaning of life" plays in providing existential stability beyond the sum of its intellectual parts:

Subjectively, the feeling that life is meaningful - that there are ultimate values, that life has a purpose - tends to point to a source of meaning, something higher than and external to the mere feeling or intuition of meaning. While sources of meaning vary greatly (and often contradict each other), the sense and expectation of meaning itself is surprisingly universal - so universal that the intuition is almost never challenged. This very universality should motivate us to be cautious about taking meaning’s claims at face value. One should be suspicious of any claim that is defended for contradictory reasons, and most people who agree that life is meaningful disagree as to what makes it so. The belief that life is meaningful tends to take the form of a strong feeling rather than a reasoned conclusion; indeed, one of the functions of meaning is to shield a person from the harmful effects of reasoning by providing a value that is justified for its own sake, a foundational rock for cognition below which no “whys” need be answered. (p.31)

(h/t http://blackestdespondency.tk/post/120379137389/subjectively-the-feeling-that-life-is-meaningful)

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I rather appreciate that she begins with the acknowledgment that the feeling there is a meaning to life waiting to be discovered or articulated is just that: a feeling, rather than an empirically observable fact about the universe. It's a widespread feeling, to be sure, but even so I suspect no one here** or anywhere else has ever come across that big eff-off stone tablet, ten hundred feet tall, covered with big eff-off graven letters, spelling out the text of the cosmic meaning of life Mad Libs? "The meaning of life is __________ (insert noun) and to live one's life __________ (adverb). The best tips for this meaning of life can be found in __________ (book title)."

The publisher of Every Cradle Is a Grave has made a PDF of the entire book available for free download, here.

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* The antinatalist is sometimes referred to as 'the wisdom of Silenus': "For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes."

** If you HAVE found such a tablet, feel free to spill the details. We may be skeptics, but in view of such evidence, I don't think we're so proud that we wouldn't revise our worldview as needed to admit the existence of some great eff-off cosmic Mad Libs publisher out there somewhere, leaving tablets around willy-nilly to remind us that there is a meaning to life waiting for us to fill in the right answer.

Dave Niose speaks about a secular life

 

Dave Niose, speaking with Chris Johnson of The Atheist Book project, makes a persuasive, rational, disarming case for living a secular life. Niose is the author of Nonbeliever Nation and president of the American Humanist Association.

Books of possible interest

Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development, by Eugene Webb (university of Missouri Press; 312 pages; $49.95). Draws on the theories of Karl Kaspers and Jean Piaget in a study of links between religious belief and aggression or intolerance. [ZB: I think prior to focusing on religious belief, a more foundational study should be conducted to understand the relationship between aggression/intolerance and ideological thinking, of which religious belief is a subset.)

Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture, by J. Heath Atchley (University of Virgina Press; 181 pages; $49.50 hardcover, $19.50 paperback). Argues that a dogmatic separation between religion and the secular impedes the experience of what is termed immanent value. [ZB: Such impediment is an achievement of rationalism.]

Both these authors seem to be trading in nonsense (I've only seen the Atchley book). The supposed experience of those who claim to have encountered immanent is a category error, committed when we attribute existence to a reified percept that doesn't have a counterpart in reality. As when we think of god -- immanent entities may seem to exist, but our experience is no proof of their existence. Atchley's argument may be imaginative, but stumbles out of the blocks and is, by the finish, invalid. Immanence is widely thought to describe a number of entities which exist; I'm still waiting for an argument to be made that the term has any meaning at all in relation to ontology.

"Webb argues that authentic religion need not succumb to dogmatism, or support fanaticism, or be consigned to the stages of immature culture." (from the publisher's website.) There are other reasons for identifying religion as the practice of an immature culture, even if Prof. Webb is successful in demonstrating that the critics of religion do not account for the complexity of the institution they are deriding.

Responding to critics of religion, from Sigmund Freud to Daniel Dennett, he demonstrates that religious traditions have more spiritual depth than these critics have granted and a greater potential for development than they believe, along lines they might even favor. His insightful book proposes that, if religious people can step back from their traditions and consider them as partial ways of relating to transcendent ultimacy, the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect." Sure they can: just adopt publicly accessible rules for mediating mutually exclusive claims for truth, instead of hiding behind a civil but only seeming tolerance. Jesus came to bring the sword, after all, division -- not peace. If religions can't all be correct, let's get to finding out which one is the right one. I have a guess, of course: the one without the imaginary friends. Oh, they all have such friends? Then maybe they're all equally wrong.

Two more grand expeditions, struck out from the humanities camp in a hunting way. They're after tigers, and more: for they'd like to bag the credit for dressing theistic belief in intellectually defensible skins, as well. Unfortunately for their project -- though I don't really think it unfortunate -- is the reality that transcendent entities have not ever been shown to exist, that the world looks as we would expect given the nonexistence of deities.

(I came across these listings in The Chronicle Review, 3/20/09)