Meaning, Posited and Found: Craft, Community, Love.

Nowadays it seems fashionable to say that the meaning of life is to make life meaningful, or that life is what you make of it. The idea that life has a definite meaning seems to have died with God. In his wake we have assumed a Nietzschean stance towards meaning: to live life meaningfully is to create your own meaning, to carve out a lifestyle, to be an existential artist, to posit your own values.

Vonnegut put this idea in relatively tame terms, declaring that we are here to fart around, have a good time. On this view, life's meaning is not out there, it is not waiting for us to discover it. It is something that we hold within us, that we paint the world with. Similarly, Nietzsche talked about how we are free to create meaning in our own lives. The free person, for Nietzsche, is the free spirit, he who is creative and lively enough to make the world meaningful. Thus he wrote in his notebook of 1887:

 "values and their changes stand in relation to the growth in power of the value-positer,
        the measure of unbelief, of 'freedom of the mind' that is admitted, as an expression of the growth in power
        'nihilism' as the ideal of the highest powerfulness of spirit, of the greatest over-abundance of life: part destructive, part ironic"
(pg 148, 9[40], in Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rudiger Bittner).

Perhaps this is why Nietzsche says that the free person is akin to the warrior. "The human being who has become free–and how much more the spirit who has become free–spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeeps, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior." (Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 542). Why a warrior? Because one is a carver of the world? Making it mean what you want it to mean? Bending it to your vision?

Is the Will to Power a psychological phenomenon?

I'm not sure.

I do believe, however, that there is meaning already in the world. It does not come from me. It is there for me to find.

The meaning of life is not simply to make life meaningful. That may be part of it. But part of me wants to say 'The meaning of life is right in front of you'. It is here, and our business is to be attuned to it.

These thoughts were put to me with great clarity in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in their book All Things Shining. Their task is to balance our view of the world by reminding us of how meaning can be found rather than simply posited, as Nietzsche seems to have believed.

Their analysis of our situation is exciting, sophisticated, and accessible. To be brutally schematic, they write a historical narrative that shows that Western experience has gradually become more and more centered on the rational autonomous individual, reaching its apex with Nietzsche's assertion that meaning is strictly a matter of value-positing.

Following Heidegger, they claim that there are two ways that we can find meaning already existing in the world: craft and community.

A craftsman will often have such an intimate relationship with her raw material that it seems to suggest meaning. A carpenter, for example, may say that a piece of wood wanted to be cut in a certain way. I find this in my own craft. Milk, for example, wants to be poured in certain ways. It has its own properties and I use it according to its preferences. I feel this meaning to be contained in the milk, and not merely imposed.

In community and group energy, too, we find meaning. Dreyfus and Kelly continually point to sports as an example of meaning outside of us that can be found in the world. They claim that in those moments of collective joy meaning 'whooshes' up around us. It is not merely imposed or posited by us, but sweeps us away. Heidegger similarly talked about moods as shared phenomena, as something that belong to the space and not to individual minds.

In both instances our task is not to create meaning, but to be attuned to the meaning that already exists. Our job is to find the meaning, not make the meaning.

These are excellent points and ones I'm happy to reflect on. They do indeed get us a few steps away from the nihilism implicit in the view that the goal of life is to make life meaningful.

My interest these days is in the question of love as a form of meaning that is already in the world. I want to try and use love as a way out of nihilism.

Love, as Bloom knew, is not posited. One does not decide to see love in the world. One walks into it, as if into a magnetic field.

Here is perhaps the crucial point: the dominant experience we have is of moving the world. We posit our values, we hatch our plans, we control our lives. Love, just like craft and community, on the other hand, is fundamentally an experience of being moved.

This is a point that I'm beginning to explore. I've been slowly reflecting on it since I read Love & Friendship, but my thinking has acquired some momentum after reading Dreyfus and Kelly, Nietzsche, Strauss, more Bloom, and others. I'm finding lots of exciting ways to connect the question of love to my concerns about nihilism.

More thoughts to come.