Meaning?
XEV
Now your question of the "meaning of life" is rather meaningless. It's a question of language, not of philosophy, and can't really be solved by logical-philosophical methods.
How could you resolve a word like "meaning"? As "function" or "purpose", correct?
Now the only "function" of life is to produce other life. But even this is a blind expression of will, and there is no "purpose" to it.
You could also ask, in a moral sense, what the "purpose" of life is. Then you will get varied answers - having power, being happy, doing-good, becoming famous through your deeds, loving or serving some ideal.
While all these things have a common feature, they only say what the person answering the question considers most valuable. They say nothing of purpose - for life would still be, and was long before, people decided that the purpose of life was to live in a certain way.
I agree with you.
To place a meaning or purpose to life is to negate free-will and to make the idea of self a big joke.
To search for purpose and meaning in life, other than in the self, is to search for external validation and guidance.
In life, luckily, there is only function, and meaning is dependant on personal motives and perspectives. If your motive is to fit in or to belong and your perspective is that of a frightened mind looking for concretes and absolutes then you will always ask the question: “What is the meaning of life?”
To which question only you could and should answer.
The question is meaningless.
Life simply is, and the problem of life's meaning can only be addressed to those who find life problematic.
Most of the philosophical problems facing humanity today have been caused because we ask the wrong questions in the wrong ways. To place meaning outside human consciousness and to seek it outwardly, is like looking for your self in other peoples eyes.
The human mind is responsible for creating meaning, for meaning is simply an interpretation.
What is the interpreter in this case? The human conscious mind.
I personally would be greatly disheartened if the question of meaning could be answered sufficiently.
Now to morality -
Again, "why be moral" is a non-question. We are given this vauge term "moral" and asked to resolve it in a concrete manner.
This is why those who try to answer the question - like Kant - generally first try to resolve what morality is.
But after thousands of years of trying to resolve this question, nobody has ever adequetely defined morality. They simply assert "morality is this or that" and (hopefully) explain why they make this assertion.
"Morality" is an ill-applied word that generally refers to the user's customs. Yet ethics is not yet ready to be discarded.
A good definition of ‘morality’ is the sacrifice of personal interests to the interests of the whole.
Being that human beings are social animals, some form of morality will always exist.
The question now is whose and towards what end?
We do see something like Kantian "moral laws" when we observe even the most dissimular cultures. Even those that have wildly different ethical customs do at least have ethical customs. What would explain this very general existence of ethical rules? The general trend of western philosophy has been to attribute them to a metaphysical "idea" or "form" of ethics - whether Plato's "good", Aquinas' "God" or Kant's "universal principle". But this is to introduce a term that we cannot solve through philosophical method.
What could explain these? Instinct.
The reason why there are so many similarities between moral systems is because all systems all social groups have many common interests: discipline, conformity, harmony, control.
Where there is a divergence in moral law is when different motives and goals come into play.
It is instinct that drives us to murder and to condemn murder, to thieve and to hold inviolate the property of our friends. Instinct gives us a general sense of ethics - culture reifies that sense and gives it form.
It focuses it for its own purposes and meanings.
Both the "meaning of life" and the "meaning of ethics" are blind alleys in philosophy, non-questions that have distracted many a powerful mind in the attempt to resolve them.
Ethics, in my view, is a subject that should not be taught in school under the philosophy discipline.
If anything, it belongs under religion or spirituality.
Just by posing the question of what is ‘good’ or what is ‘just’ or what is ‘moral you are inadvertently placing the common interests above your own
§outh§tar
Does it not bother you that you just might be wrong concerning God and that you might actually end up in hell for eternity? The very possibility that they might be right when they say there is a hell, despite the lack of evidence is something that bothers me..
If you believe suffering for what you are and paying the price for being honest and true to yourself is not worth eternal hell, then you have no place being free.
If I’m supposed to suffer for living up to the very things I was created to be by the very creator who created me, supposedly, then when the time comes I’ll spit in His/Her/Its face and endure the price of being human.
Besides, I suspect that nothing can be worse than existence.
