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| coberst |
 Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 1:37 am Post subject: We Are Meaning Creating Creatures |
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Forum Bachelors Degree
Joined: 18 Feb 2007
Posts: 472
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We Are Meaning Creating Creatures
The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank
In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life?
The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man?
“Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy.
Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”
After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern wo/man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination.
The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.
Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”
Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??
Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker |
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| Pikkhaud |
| Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject: |
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Forum Sophomore
Joined: 21 Aug 2007
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Applaudance Coberst, this has to be your shortest starting post.
_________________
There is no I in team, but there is a me though if you juble it a bit.
The more seeds I grow the more pot I can smoke |
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| sunshinewarrior |
| Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:06 am Post subject: Re: We Are Meaning Creating Creatures |
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Forum Ph.D.
Joined: 26 Sep 2007
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| coberst wrote: |
Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”
Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??
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Dithey seems to have taken the meaning of 'meaning' to be any human mental/conscious activity. This is too broad a definition for any conclusion to be true except by definition.
The next quote seems to be a non sequitur - where did 'soul' come from in this discussion, unless by invalid reification? |
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| free radical |
| Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:26 am Post subject: |
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Forum Masters Degree
Joined: 24 Sep 2007
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| It seems he is saying that meaning is a willful process towards a specific goal, not any mental/conscious activity. (However, I don't know that there can be any objective 'meaning' to life at any rate. Surely meaning is defined, although perhaps I am misunderstanding your point.) |
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| coberst |
| Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:28 am Post subject: Re: We Are Meaning Creating Creatures |
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Forum Bachelors Degree
Joined: 18 Feb 2007
Posts: 472
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| sunshinewarrior wrote: |
| coberst wrote: |
Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”
Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??
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Dithey seems to have taken the meaning of 'meaning' to be any human mental/conscious activity. This is too broad a definition for any conclusion to be true except by definition.
The next quote seems to be a non sequitur - where did 'soul' come from in this discussion, unless by invalid reification? |
I think that Dilthey is speaking about meaning in the sense that something is meaningful to me if I have a vested interest in that thing. Iraq is somewhat meaningful to me because America is at war there. Now if my grandson joins the army, Iraq is going to become much more meaningful to me, and if he should be sent there then it really is going to be top drawer meaningful to me because I have a great vested interest in the place.
Most people consider humans to be animal nature plus an X factor. Some call this X factor soul, some call it mind, reason, spirit, etc. |
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| sunshinewarrior |
| Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 4:29 am Post subject: |
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Forum Ph.D.
Joined: 26 Sep 2007
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He says:
"Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience"
This seems to me to be a very inadequate description/definition. How does it apply to plants for instance?
Worse - does it cover what we humans normally consider to be meaning or is the definition a lot broader than that? If, as I suspect, you agree that it's a broader definition than we usually use, then it is not legitimate (logically speaking) to use it as though we were talking about common meaning.
Strangely enough, I agree with coberst's title - I do believe that we are meaning creators, and I even agree that it was Kant who first showed this to us. It's just that some of the other conclusions drawn - talk about the 'soul', and these broader senses of the word meaning, are not warranted.
Maybe that's just me... |
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| free radical |
| Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 8:53 am Post subject: |
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Forum Masters Degree
Joined: 24 Sep 2007
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Coberst, could you indicate which of the statements in thie quoted passage below are from Dilthey and which are from you. The subject is of passing interest but I do not wish to comment further until the statements' origins are more clear. As the quotation marks currently stand, this is not clear.
| Quote: |
| The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts. |
In the meantime, it seems that the kernel of originality in Dilthey's writings is the idea that meaning is a process rather than a thing. |
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| coberst |
| Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 9:07 am Post subject: |
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Forum Bachelors Degree
Joined: 18 Feb 2007
Posts: 472
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| free radical wrote: |
Coberst, could you indicate which of the statements in thie quoted passage below are from Dilthey and which are from you. The subject is of passing interest but I do not wish to comment further until the statements' origins are more clear. As the quotation marks currently stand, this is not clear.
| Quote: |
| The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts. |
In the meantime, it seems that the kernel of originality in Dilthey's writings is the idea that meaning is a process rather than a thing. |
Every thing enclosed except "meaning" is a Becker quote. "meaning" I guess is quoted from a Dilthey text. I guess that Dilthey was not the first man of letters to recognze this meaning for the word "meaning". The philosophy of objectivism has so taken over our common thinking that few people recognize the two different meanings of the word "meaning".
Meaning, like many words, has more than one meaning. We look up a definition in the dictionary and that is a meaning. Also each of us create meaning out of our associations with objects or ideas. |
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