{"id":9342,"date":"2012-09-22T12:49:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T12:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/09\/22\/if-our-lives-have-meaning-we-cannot-be-its-source\/"},"modified":"2012-09-22T12:49:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T12:49:00","slug":"if-our-lives-have-meaning-we-cannot-be-its-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/09\/22\/if-our-lives-have-meaning-we-cannot-be-its-source\/","title":{"rendered":"We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it.  Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life has no meaning.  Thus meaning does not come from God or der Fuehrer<\/em> or il Duce<\/em> or the government (as some contemporary liberals seem to think) or the state or society or other people, or anything exogenic, but comes, if it comes at all, from the wellsprings of one's own selfhood.<\/span><\/p>\n

One could call this subjectivist theory  an identity theory of existential<\/em> (as opposed to linguistic) meaning<\/em>:  there is such a thing as the meaning of an individual human life, but what that meaning is<\/em> is identical to the meaning the individual in question gives to its life.  By contrast, an eliminativist theory of existential meaning<\/em> would have it that there is no such thing as existential meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now it seems to me that the subjectivist identity theory just sketched is untenable, precisely for the reason that it cannot be kept from collapsing into an eliminativist theory.  (This is a special case of how identity theories, which attempt to reduce A to B without denying the existence of A,  often collapse into eliminativist theories. See here<\/a> and here<\/a> for more on the general issue.)  <\/span><\/p>\n

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning.  And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning.  This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly.  These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me.  It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless.  <\/span><\/p>\n

The attempted identification of meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we have here is a 'bootstrap problem.'  Just as I cannot bootstrap myself into existence, i.e., cause my own existence (since that would require me to exist before I exist), I cannot bootstrap my existence into meaningfulness, i.e., bring it about that my existence has meaning.  Just as I cannot exist before I exist, I cannot have meaning before I have meaning.  I cannot be the source of my own meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the only meaning my existence has is the meaning I give it, then that I exist at all is meaningless.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it.  Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life … Continue reading “We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meaning-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}