Cosmic meaning?

Finding Meaning in Suffering
Patrick Testa on the extraordinary hope offered by Viktor Frankl.

A second way Frankl believed we could find meaning is through love, whether it’s love of another person, or of art or nature.

Over and again, however, from my frame of mind, words like “love” can mean many different things to many different people. There’s the dictionary definition – “an intense feeling of deep affection” – and there are all of the at times conflicting things that men and women actually feel deep affection for. In other words, morally, politically and spiritually what or who you love dearly others might hate dearly. The part I root existentially in dasein, but the part others root instead in one or another One True Path. The part that revolves around as the song says “love my way”.

Or else.

I certainly do agree that in regard to the lives we live from day to day and our interactions with others, meaning is bursting at the seams. It’s everywhere. On the other hand, what if we live in a world where there is no essential meaning – purpose, dignity – applicable to words like love?

I might be completely wrong about this, but I suspect those like Frankl who have experienced great suffering or have been around it on a mass scale, find themselves in a situation where they are either able to provide themselves with something in the way of a meaningful antidote or it all collapses into an essentially meaningless world in which “shit happens”.

My retort is quite simple, if I may, that the basic law of intentional change of mind, hence of historical determinism it’s self is
That turning, not only in the context of how Heidegger termed it of shifting away from the meaning of meanings or residing in the restricted Jewish place of the Holy of Hollies, but in the the sense of willing the redemptive ‘facticity, of offering the other cheek.?

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning.

In their 1983 film The Meaning of Life, Monty Python took their departing shot at the movie-going public, and simultaneously at philosophical aspirations. With their customary combination of profundity and profanity they systematically skewered the idea that any meaning at all can be derived from the pell-mell absurdity of human life.

Meaning what?

Really, there’s no getting around the fact that our lives are bursting at the seams with meaning. But that’s not the point. Well, not mine anyway. Instead, the point seems to be that in regard to value judgments there does not appear to be a way in which to reconcile all the conflicting assessments such that in regard to moral and political interactions the optimal, deontological meaning can be ascertained.

In other words, not just up in the theoretical clouds.

Tracking Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’, the film derided every scheme by which humankind tries to assign purpose to the universe. It culminated in the following pronouncement:

Lady Presenter: Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.
[Receives an envelope]
Lady Presenter: Thank you, Brigitte.
[Opens envelope, reads what’s inside]
Lady Presenter: Hmm. Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations…

What I call a “general description intellectual contraption”. The point isn’t to embrace those goals so much as it is to come up with a way in which reconfigure those theoretical assessments into actual social, political and economic policy.

That’s often what the moral objectivists among us will go about serving up as well. Technical points they may or may not be able to instantiate existentially.

Of course, in reality it doesn’t work like that at all. Instead, the vast majority of men and women around the globe are indoctrinated as children to embrace one or another One True Path. And though some change course as adults, it’s usually only to shift gears to yet another One True Path.