Saturday, May 12, 2007
hammers and meaning
Someone once said that everything looks like a nail to the man holding a hammer. these days it seems more apropos to say that everything seems worth remembering to the person holding a camera, or more profound to the man who is wont to write poetry. it's always difficult to distinguish between value discovered and value fabricated. popular media teaches us to see through a melodramatic lens; music, movie and television corrupt one's sense of reality. conventional wisdom has made importance, like the rest of einstein's world, relative, and the social event replaces the meaning-void. nostalgia is what one finds comforting, safety in the unchanging and ever impressing past; we are seeing the present 'through the rear-view mirror.' it seems foolish to still have days you had when you were seventeen; i have yet to find an ideology, a person, an arbitrary goal to commit myself to. that's what adulthood, is i believe; resignation. create a goal, make a plan and hope for longevity and good credit. i think. i am still young enough to have romantic proclivities. i can never tell if something actually matters or if i just make it matter; the most vexing thought is wondering why i have the desire to assign everything degrees of final relevance. i can't help but feel that i am creating the circumstances that cause me to question so that i might have something to think about, that i seek out my problems in order to give my life complexity.
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7 comments:
Hey Tyler,
how's life in Pendleton? I'm not sure if I spelled that right, but whatever. Did you finish that book on faith and reason yet? So, have you started working yet or is your group still hanging out waiting?
You have some interesting thoughts in your blog. Do you suppose that there is always a difference between meaning found and meaning "created"? It seems to me that meaning and value are two different things. Meaning, by definition, is assigned by the one to whom something has meaning. I don't know that there can be meaning apart from some consciousness to give it. Of course the same might be said of value and surely there is some relativity in it. After all, different things have different value to different people. On the other hand, it seems plausible that some things might just have value intrinsically by virtue of being what they are, but of course that is by no means agreed upon. I suppose it partly depends on your definition of value.
does this comment thing work?
Hey I was thinking some more and...do you think that having the tendency to romaticize things is necessarily associated with age? I think that you are right about romantizing being more of a trend within youth, but perhaps this is more noble than the dogmas of the elderly. On the other hand, it could possibly be the byproduct of naiveness as opposed to wisdom. Yet, isn't that what the story of Peter Pan is all about? That in some respects it is better to remain youthful than to "grow up"?
the idea that nothing has intrinsicly identifiable meaning or importance; that such is always a matter of perspective, this is disconcerting. even if there is an ultimate observer perspective, we don't have access to it, and even if we did it would still be from our perspective. it just seems futile to even speak of value knowing it's based on subjective justification.
the romanticism of the young and prudence of the aged can both tend towards exaggeration and overcompensation. younger people can afford to be unrealistic or extrarealistic, but once you have settled into your life's path there is little need to dream, only to fulfill. both are natural but i don't know if one is better. i finished the book and get some thoughts on it shortly.
So, would you say that things like love and friendship do not have intrinsic value? I suppose we may need to analyze the concept of value before we try to make hard and fast conclusions about it.
But even if we are confined to our own exiguous and linear perspectives, does this mean that we are inept to attain anything objective? Is this not the power of reason, the ability to abstract? After all, even you would agree that all perspectives are not "created equal", no?
I suppose it just seems queer to suppose that such things as love and hate are only a matter of perspective. We seem readily able to recognize the value in the one and not the other.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
the objective is an abstract, a generalization of consensus. by deffinition it is outside of your perspective, at best, it is experienced subjectivly- we have discussed this twenty times. my original thought in my post was that what is important to you is that which you make important, ergo, the search for importance or value ends up inside ones self. one cannot look outside themself to find what they should do, what to believe, what to value; such choices are based on personal values, interpretations of sense perception and so on. value is not discovered for the same reasons that science is not self conclusive. as for love and hate and friendship; those are all emotions and inherently personal. the question there is not why should they be valued, but why are they, and those answers are fairly intuitive.
It seems to me that the question is very much "why should they be valued?" What do you mean that the objective is only experienced subjectively? If you reduce everything to experience then sure, but knowing that 2+2=4 or that the law of non-contradiction must by necessity be true,etc. is not a matter of simple experience. It is not subjective. One may know things subjectively meaning that the subject is the one knowing, but that doesn't make the object of knowledge any less objective or accessible in that regard.
Because of reason, I believe that people can look outside themselves. Values, etc. should not just be made up. One should value love and not hate. One should believe what is logical and not believe the absurd. Otherwise, even all your social criticisms are completely unfounded!
As for love, hate, and friendship, it seems a bit irresponsible to make a simple reduction of them to emotions to suite your point. It's not nearly so easy as that.
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