Cosmic meaning?

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning.

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer… The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the meaning of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that meaning?)” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

On the other hand, once again, this basically revolves [for me] around meaning which can be communicated such that everyone readily understands it.

For example, what does it mean to submit posts here? Not the content of the post but the act of submitting it itself. Are we going to engage in heated arguments about it? Not likely unless you are afflicted with one or another “condition” thwarting your capacity to think rationally even in regard to the either/or world.

For all its apparent importance, the question of the meaning of life is most strange. For the vast majority of people outside academe, it is the defining concern of philosophy, the issue that provides philosophy’s raison d’etre.

Actually, for the vast majority of people, meaning revolves around raising a family or going to school or going to work and getting the bills paid. Or simply doing all of the things that must be done if you are to subsist [or even thrive] from day to day.

Academic philosophers should hesitate before dismissing this view with a smile of polite embarrassment, for there is surely a broad but defensible sense of the question in which all philosophy is, indeed, about nothing else.

Okay, what then has the philosophical community [academic or otherwise] concluded in regard to meaning and morality? For example, socially, politically and economically, are we or are we not demonstrably responsible for what we say and do?

The defensible sense is the conception of philosophy as an attempt to understand the human condition and our place in the universe – the attempt, in short, to answer the three questions that Kant believed to comprise all philosophy: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?

Just out of curiosity, how might Kant have reacted to 1] The Gap, 2] Rummy’s Rule and/or 3] the Benjamin Button Syndrome? Instead, he falls back on God as the transcending font connecting everything to everything else.

But the fact is, this putatively definitive philosophical problem had rarely been addressed explicitly by any thinker before the nineteenth century, when Nietzsche and Kierkegaard made it their preoccupation. And although it would seem foolhardy or perverse to deny the importance of the question, exactly what is being asked and what might constitute a compelling answer have been notoriously elusive of clarification. In addition, the problem of the meaning of life seems to generate a multitude of paradoxes.

Here, it seems, we have the two paths taken by the existentialists to assess meaning [and morality]…God and No God. Kierkegaard takes a “leap of faith” to the Christian God while Nietzsche buried Him. But then the part where some say Nietzsche blinked and “thought up” the closest thing to God and religion…the Ubermensch and Eternal Recurrence.

[iambiguous]

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?
Jeffrey Gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning.

In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s poignant metaphor of spiritual crisis, Gogo asks Didi what will happen to them when Godot at last arrives. It soon becomes clear that neither has any idea, that the sole focus of their relentless hope is shrouded in utter obscurity.

Some see godot here as God. In other words, the human condition is not essentially meaningless and purposeless. We just have to wait patiently for a God, the God to reveal Himself and disclose “the meaning of it all”. Others see godot as any explanation at all regarding The Meaning of Life. While others still see godot as the Grim Reaper…death: https://youtu.be/6W9PuLcoZMM?si=j1P58P0oOFcsSSW5

Are we not precisely in their condition whenever we wonder how our lives will be changed once the meaning of life is revealed?

More to the point [mine] what on Earth is to be done about it?

Actually, take your pick. In other words, there are hundreds and hundreds of sure-fire antidotes “out there”. And all one needs to do then is to believe that the One True Path they are on really, really is the One True Path to, well, whatever one needs it to be, right?

The above quotation from Wittgenstein alerts us to a similar paradox. Having felt perhaps for years that his life is deprived of meaning, a person now feels the meaning restored. But when we inquire of him just what this newfound meaning is, he’s inevitably unable to say.

On the other hand, if the restoration allows someone to sustain a comforting and consoling frame of mind all the way to the grave, what difference does it make if what is believed is in fact actually false?

Here is a kind of knowledge or wisdom we are inclined to regard as of the utmost importance, and yet we may well be at a loss to say what difference it will make to our lives once we acquire it, and we will be unable to express the knowledge when we possess it. What other enduring philosophical problem is so scuttled in paradox and confusion?

And then we only have to go back to the existence of existence itself and “somehow” fit the human condition into it.