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What is the meaning of the meaning of life?

JimW said:
I think it's also because these are such universal concerns that these texts and fragments tend to survive translation and the massive cultural and temporal distances so well where other aspects of ritual and so forth can be quite opaque to us now.
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And generally art does it best. There is nothing to say except to express our feelings towards the question, and that tends to be done best in stories. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is really boring after all.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
And generally art does it best. There is nothing to say except to express our feelings towards the question, and that tends to be done best in stories. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is really boring after all.
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Yes; never even tried Wittgenstein though but will take your word.
 
PTK said:
Thanks for this. I had not heard it before. He hit the nail on the head, whoever wrote this.
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Nobody knows who wrote it. It is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest written stories we have (in fragments at least).

No doubt such sentiments long predate writing.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Nobody knows who wrote it. It is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest written stories we have (in fragments at least).
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I once wrote a story on some clay tablets, and I was on holiday in Iraq, and dropped them, and some clever people now say "no-one knows who wrote this". Well, it was me. My first language is Akkadian.
 
As Jim says, it is telling, I think, that it could have been written yesterday. Think Bergman's Seventh Seal. It is the same thing.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
As Jim says, it is telling, I think, that it could have been written yesterday. Think Bergman's Seventh Seal. It is the same thing.
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I love seals, and was disappointed that there was not one seal in that film. I thought it was going to be about sea life, and it turns out to be about a knight playing chess with Death by the seaside. It looked as excting as a wet Sunday in Clacton.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
As Jim says, it is telling, I think, that it could have been written yesterday. Think Bergman's Seventh Seal. It is the same thing.
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A corollary is those moments in certain cultures where they seemed to take a very different attitude; remember being quite impressed as a kid by some no doubt entirely hokey Western thing where the Native American battles fearlessly because "this is a good day to die" and that was sort of reinforced by Brian Moore's Black Robe (which you'd hope was better researched) where one of the main characters is pretty sanguine about it all and as he's dying realises it's in a spot he's been seeing constantly in his dreams so he says how much harder he'd have fought if he'd known this was going to be his place of death not those battle fields. Even Mel Gibson sort of realised a convincing society where death and existence might mean something else in Apocalypto. Not really looked into it in much detail though and might be largely fictional.
 
JimW said:
A corollary is those moments in certain cultures where they seemed to take a very different attitude; remember being quite impressed as a kid by some no doubt entirely hokey Western thing where the Native American battles fearlessly because "this is a good day to die" and that was sort of reinforced by Brian Moore's Black Robe (which you'd hope was better researched) where one of the main characters is pretty sanguine about it all and as he's dying realises it's in a spot he's been seeing constantly in his dreams so he says how much harder he'd have fought if he'd known this was going to be his place of death not those battle fields. Even Mel Gibson sort of realised a convincing society where death and existence might mean something else in Apocalypto. Not really looked into it in much detail though and might be largely fictional.
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Sometimes it makes sense to risk your life, if the life you would certainly have to live if you did nothing would be horredous, but figthing might change things.
 
JimW said:
A corollary is those moments in certain cultures where they seemed to take a very different attitude; remember being quite impressed as a kid by some no doubt entirely hokey Western thing where the Native American battles fearlessly because "this is a good day to die" and that was sort of reinforced by Brian Moore's Black Robe (which you'd hope was better researched) where one of the main characters is pretty sanguine about it all and as he's dying realises it's in a spot he's been seeing constantly in his dreams so he says how much harder he'd have fought if he'd known this was going to be his place of death not those battle fields. Even Mel Gibson sort of realised a convincing society where death and existence might mean something else in Apocalypto. Not really looked into it in much detail though and might be largely fictional.
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In expounding his theory about consciousness, Julian Jaynes made a big deal out of the lack of interior monologue in Old Testament stories or the Iliad. He stated that there is action, or there is a god telling the character what to do. Jaynes interpreted this as a split consciousness in which people dealt with novel situations by hearing a voice instructing them. Yet in Gilgamesh, which predates the Iliad and most of the Bible by a millennium, that voice is clearly silent. Due, perhaps, to the kind of question being asked.

The samurai are said to have been impressed by the lack of fear of death exhibited by Chinese monks, and to have incorporated aspects of Zen Buddhism into their systems as a result. Strikes me that this is also due to the absence of a certain kind of question, a Gilgameshian question. 'Don't ask' would be the Zen answer. Or even, perhaps, 'there is no question'.

There is a Zen story about a man on a horse. Someone asks the rider where he is going. 'I don't know,' he replies, 'Ask the horse'.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
In expounding his theory about consciousness, Julian Jaynes made a big deal out of the lack of interior monologue in Old Testament stories or the Iliad. He stated that there is action, or there is a god telling the character what to do. Jaynes interpreted this as a split consciousness in which people dealt with novel situations by hearing a voice instructing them. Yet in Gilgamesh, which predates the Iliad and most of the Bible by a millennium, that voice is clearly silent. Due, perhaps, to the kind of question being asked.

The samurai are said to have been impressed by the lack of fear of death exhibited by Chinese monks, and to have incorporated aspects of Zen Buddhism into their systems as a result. Strikes me that this is also due to the absence of a certain kind of question, a Gilgameshian question. 'Don't ask' would be the Zen answer. Or even, perhaps, 'there is no question'.

There is a Zen story about a man on a horse. Someone asks the rider where he is going. 'I don't know,' he replies, 'Ask the horse'.
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Is the Zen story that you quote saying that we should just let events take us along, and not try to change events?
 
littlebabyjesus said:
He stated that there is action, or there is a god telling the character what to do.
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Sure I read somewhere about "enthusiasm" coming from the Greek to have a god acting within/through you as happens in the Illiad and Odyssey. Rather than a split consciousness I always assumed it was referring to the more animal - pre-ego consciousness where perhaps it does just feel like cosmic powers acting through your specificity (man...) and those early urban societies were in transition from the preponderance of one sort to another.
ETA Of course perhaps that's what your man meant by split.
 
JimW said:
Sure I read somewhere about "enthusiasm" coming from the Greek to have a god acting within/through you as happens in the Illiad and Odyssey. Rather than a split consciousness I always assumed it was referring to the more animal - pre-ego consciousness where perhaps it does just feel like cosmic powers acting through your specificity (man...) and those early urban societies were in transition from the preponderance of one sort to another.
ETA Of course perhaps that's what your man meant by split.
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I just looked it up, and "enthusiasm" does indeed come from the Greek meaning having a god inside you, i.e. being inspired by a god.

It is always worth looking up words. I was interested to discover some years ago that "passionate" had to do with suffering, which is why the story of the death of Jesus is called The Passion. To be passionate about something is to be prepared to suffer for it.
 
It seems to me that the meaning of “the meaning of life” might be defined as an explanation for a set of behaviours in which a person engages.

Imagine that we see a woman moving in a peculiar way. She is waving her arms about, and saying “shoo, shoo” aloud. Why is she behaving like this? We ask her, and she tells us that a fly had been bothering her, and she was trying to make it move away. There was purpose to her behaviour. There was a meaning to her actions.
 
JimW said:
Sure I read somewhere about "enthusiasm" coming from the Greek to have a god acting within/through you as happens in the Illiad and Odyssey. Rather than a split consciousness I always assumed it was referring to the more animal - pre-ego consciousness where perhaps it does just feel like cosmic powers acting through your specificity (man...) and those early urban societies were in transition from the preponderance of one sort to another.
ETA Of course perhaps that's what your man meant by split.
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Not quite. I think Jaynes was wrong about most things, but that he was wrong in interesting ways. Firstly, I think he was wrong to think that a split mind such as he imagined to exist in the Bronze Age ('bicameral mind' was his term) was not conscious. It may have lacked a unified 'I' - some people still do of course, and Jaynes goes into that too - but that doesn't mean no consciousness. A consciousness does not need to have a specific kind of content. It certainly doesn't need to contain words, nor does it need to contain a single unified perceiver. That's the biggest mistake in his thesis, imo.

Something he does go into a fair bit as well is the origin of words, specifically of words referring to the mind and consciousness, such as psyche, that originate in physical, non-conscious phenomena. In the case of psyche, Jaynes says that its origin is from 'breathe' (this is disputed). So the recognition of life's physical manifestation came before the recognition of its mental manifestation, essentially. And the origin of words, which arise from a process of metaphor, reflects and is evidence of that. I think Jaynes is onto something with this part of his argument. It isn't his main argument, but it is his strongest, I think. It links in with the idea that we recognise our own autonomous existence only after recognising the autonomy of others and recognising that they are 'not I', that we come to our own minds via the minds of others.

Specifically regarding 'enthusiasm', that it is a motivation of mysterious origin makes it a natural thing to attribute to the gods, I would think. And plenty of people still think in these kinds of terms a lot, or at least part, of the time. Jaynes' idea was more specific than that - confronted with a novel situation, your decision as to what to do presents itself to you as a voice. But decisions are also of rather mysterious origin really, so again, not so strange to think of them as being attributed to gods. Whether that was always strictly as Jaynes imagined - a voice heard as real rather than a 'silent' internal voice such as we all still have - is another matter. It's not so controversial to think of people's thoughts manifesting as voices that are taken to be real and external, though. Religious scripture from Moses to Mohammad is filled with stories of exactly that happening. But by what reasoning do we take our own internal 'silent' voices to be us and not external. I would suggest that it's not immediately obvious that we should do so without some external confirmation.
 
Reminded me that I like the turn of phrase "a meaning look", somehow neater than "meaningful".
 
BassJunkie said:
The Meaning Of Life is that it ends, so said Kafka.
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I disagree very strongly with this idea that life somehow has to be limited in order to be meaningful. A longer life has more room into which one can pack meaning. I would argue instead that it's those persons whose lives are needlessly cut short, who are the ones deprived of further meaning.

Maybe that's not what Kafka is actually saying (I've not read him), but the quote did remind that there are those people who do seem to believe that life has to end to have meaning.
 
PTK said:
What is the meaning of the meaning of life?
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The meaning of the meaning of life is an individual question that can only be truly answered by one person at any one time.

Because we are all individually minded each answer will be different, some answers will be very similar but ultimately different.

In fact the question itself has no meaning as the question is a collection of words & life itself is the experience of living.

So to summarise
Life is an experience that can be shared & the experience can be transcribed into words for it to be shared through words with other humans.

Words will build different pictures in the minds of each individual that reads them so to fully appreciate the meaning of the meaning of a particular life you must live, love & laugh 😃
 
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