WelcomeLife should have great meaning but no meaning
![If life has no meaning ordinary people are in mor[t]al danger!](w/images/d/dd/MoralDanger.jpg "If life has no meaning ordinary people are int mor[t]al danger!")
LLife should not have a meaning, and if it does than it shouldn't, so I reject it.
A "meaning of life" is ganerally something persons, including me, (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), am supposed to want to die for. But I want to enjoy living not die prematurely. I do not want to "have" mraning" telling me what to do and especially to throw my life away for it. Let the eaning of life find its foot troops elsewhere.
I want to create meaning, and I know that as soon as I create something it starts to degrade into just more stuff that merely exists and therefore has no mening except for any new meaning I may choos to make use of it for in future and this cycle will go on until I cease to have the capacity to carry it on. I make use of meaning, not the other way around.
If some Omnipotent Deity created the world and gave it meaning, what created him or did He masturbate himself into existence? He would just be one mor thing that exists along with any meaning" baggage He brought with Him, for me to decide what use to make of Him or not. If He wants to play nicely with me, great, otherwise he should be respectful and not cause me displeasure like my intrrusive mother or Santa Claus who snooped on me before Christmas exch year to monitor if I'd been naughty or nice (she monitored me all year round).
That's what "the meaning of life" is all about: persons who cannot or at least do not create meaning "create" meaning by re-producing the past. They keep putting more of the same lipstick each day on the same old pig. And that makes life worth living for them by having something to die for. They need to keep it to themsleves but they don't because they want others to reassure them that they are not just wasting their lives that way. They want their mommy to keep reassiring them: "Good boy (girl, other)!"
It's obvious!
Once one sees anything clearly, it's obvious — but that is a tautoloigy. The word "meaning" is both a noun and a transitive verb. There is the act-event of meaning something, and there is what that act means: the meant. And maybe the noun form has two different meanings, too: the denotative object of the meaning-act (pointing at aka: referring to some[-]thing), but also what the meaning-act is trying to accomplish ("he meaning is the use"). "The roads are icy; you should be safe and go in later." is a meaning-act. Its denotative meaning concerns H2O and asphalt and motor vehicle accidents. But the person doing the meaning-act fears the kids might have a snow day and doesn't want to be stuck babysitting them, whereas they know the person to whom the meaning is addressed hates getting to work late bacause then they have to put up with more stuff they don't like in the office.... Meaning and meaning and meaning.
People focus on what is meant, fail to fess up to what they mean, and do not notice that there is no meaning i.e.: nothing can be some[-]thing meant, outside meaning-acts.
Meaning-acts produce meaning. Try to find any meaning anywhere else; you will not succeed (for the simle reason that even "succeeding" would be just another meaning-act and its meant)./p>
Meaning-acts create meaning, and the meaning goes out of existence with along with the going out of existence of the meaning-act. The locus of meaning is not in the things meant but in meaning them. The meaning of life may be "X", but only in the act of the person asserting, i.e.: meaning: "the meaning The meaning of life is 'X'". The person is creating the meaning, albeit usually in such a way that they probably do not think they are, that somehow the meaning is "there" and they are its object (its referent) not the other way around.
Therefore: When I say I do not want life to have meaning, what I mean is that I want to thematially create meaning and enjoy my life in doing so. Meaning, meaning everywhere but a lot of it is not worth wuch or even often is a threat to me. Any "the meaning of life" to which I am suppsosed to be prepared to give up my life or my enjoyment of it for it. Life has no meaning: it's not teling me what to do (akthugh "you" may be in the modality of tellingme it is!).
Can we play nicely together and create some meaning(s)? Or don't you like that idea since you want to get somthing out of me without paying for it by asserting some meant such as: "Obey God!" or: "Be a patriot!" or whatever. Of course you can get out of me what you want if you have more horsepower at your disposal; but if you want me to voluntarily say "Thank you" you are out of luck: you will have to get thet flattery by credible threat of force, i.e.: by showing me and everybody else who might see, that you are a bully. Some people are not bothered by being seen to be evil; others like to look good despite. Volunteer is often used by altruistic (other-oriented) persons a transitive verb.
So when I say I want life to be meaningless I don't mean exatly what [the] they would mean by them,which is that there would be no pre-defined meaning for them (and also, likely, me, too) to obey, or, as it is: mean. I want lots of meaning: meaning I create and dispose of as I see fit. Maybe making chains is interesting; being chained I find not. Religious a political leaders get off on putting others in chaine they eiher create of re-create in passing them on as what they mean. And yes, a very few of them eat heir own dogfood, like St. Francis of Assisi apparently although I am no sure about that. John Kennedy invented the Peace Corps but he did not serve in it.
My idea? Let's all play nicely togetrher creating meaning. Some persons even find meaning in "preserving" old meanings, not, however, as objects of belief but as objects for delectations. They are museum conervators. They preserve a Nazi flag equally as an American Revokutionary War flag. If they wave one or the other they are no longer acting as conservators but as believers aka: "patriots" of (partisans for) one side or another.
A story Professor Forsdale told me that I like a lot: He had a girlfriend at Black Mountain Art College one summer whom he went to visit. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a bunch of the students got together (with beer) and played a softball game. Well, not exactly: they just goofed around playing at playing the game and were just having fun — not keeping score or anything like that. Then, Professor Forsdale said, one of the students started taking the game seriously and trying to win: "Then it turned ugly." My interpretation: "trying to win" is a meaning in and of life. I'd rather "goof around". Goof around with what? Maybe writing philosophy essays.
"H.L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism: 'the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.'" (Paul Krugman, NYT OpEd, 19 Mar 2021) P.S.: People call me a "killjoy". I agree: let's take the mearning in life or, more precisely: their reasons to prematurely die.... (I like the optimism one finds in the book of Ecclesiates in the Bible.)
The people
It is impolite i.e.: true, to say it, but the normal, ordinary people need to be given a meaning for their lives such as dying to defend their country againt evil enemies, or else they might do anything or nothing. A problem occurs when this is applied to someone like myself who is not ordinary and normal. Sometimes exceptional persons prove useful to the-powers-that-be and other times they get throw under the bus or, like me, ignored.
Admoniorily, it is true that creativity need not be "moral". Some creative person invented every beneficient appurtenance of the ordinary normal people's lives, from the wheel to Disneyland, but some creative person also invented concentration camps. Of course prople reject Nazism and they do not think that had the come out of different birth canal they would themselves be Nazis, so that they have their meaning in life whether it is to be Nazis or Homer Simpsons or anything elses. The meaning-act is what it is. I hypothesize that if I could get someone to live the meaning-act that eating their own body was what they should be doing, I could watch them whole-heartedly eat themself to death ("Yum!"). Or be a Christian or a Communist or any other meaning-act. As Prof. McLuhan said: "The daily special is the message."
It's all a risk. It is impossible to determine what good is, only what each person means it is. Ask any martyr if life, even his (her, other's own) is precious. The Marquis de Sade would probably sign up for Immanueal Kant's Categorical imperative: act only in such a way that your action could be universalized without self-contradiction. In the end when people cannot live with each other they go to war or perhaps one shoots the other in the back like Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. A dogmatic anti-abortioonist cannot tolerate a tolerant pro-abortionist even though the latter does not coerce the former to have abortions. Remember Samuel Paty and the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo....
Perhaps the evolution of the human biological species will destroy all life on earth with hydrogen bombs or by turning earth's atmosphere Venusian by generating enormous amounts of greenhouse gases to generate electricity for what? I don't like it; I want no part of it; but that's just my opinion and I wlll be dead soon enough. But so also will anyone who disagrees. Had they put me off at a right stop whn I w sborn I could have grown up underfoot ith persons like Marcel Ducm\hamp and Katherine Dreier. "Why not sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?"[1]
Footnotes
- ↑ "a Duchamp is not a Duchamp without an erotic joke" («Duchamp's Long Shadow: The Secret Meaning of "Tu m'"», April 10, 2017, The Los Angeles Review of Vooks, By Susan Barbour) At the stop where fate (or God) put me off there were no erotic jokes but somehow the two anti-sexuals who were my biological progenitors must have copulated and indeed since I seem to have heard my biological mother had two other pregnancies that failed, one ending in a stillbirth and the other in a severely deformed baby that died shortly after birth, my father presumably was a motherfucker. Ha! Ha!
