Happiness is achieved through Meaning I suspect that when parents are asked what are the most meaningful things in your life they will answer “My kids are the most meaningful things in my life”. A kid might say anything when asked the same question. It may be their car, their boy friend, their new hair style, their new bike, etc. The parent has had more time and experiences about which to organize what is meaningful in their life than does a kid. The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was the answer to the question “what do humans constantly strive 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…]b]Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience[/b].” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Sapiens impose symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. Her 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.” What are some of the fundamental considerations we must focus upon when we speak of creating meaning? Meaning is an abstract concept. What is an abstract concept? Webster informs me that concept is defined as “an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances”. I would say that there are two types of ideas, i.e. concepts: concrete (generic) and abstract. A concrete concept is the neural network that is created in the brain when we have a physical experience. An abstract concept is constructed, often unconsciously, by one or more concrete concepts. An abstract idea might usefully be thought of as similar to a molecule. The molecule is made up of one or more atoms and the abstract concept is made up of one or more concrete concepts. That is to say the conceptual and inference structure of a concrete concept is mapped into the “mental space” containing the abstract concept. The concrete concept is an “objective” concept while the abstract concept is a “subjective concept”. Examples of objective concepts becoming part of subjective concepts: Infant feeling warm when held mapping into subjective concept of affection. Sensing a foul smell into abstract idea of a movie “that stinks”. Sensing the rise of milk while pouring into a measuring cup leading to a subjective judgment that prices are too high. We are meaning creating creatures. We are creatures who create abstract ideas about which we live, die, and kill. Our task is to comprehend this fact and through the sophistication thus achieved we may be able to create abstract concepts suitable to permit our survival for a few more centuries.
