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
Those guys totally ripped me off. I've been on and on about meaning on these here forums. I think it's fundamental as in "a degree of freedom" that is apparently part of the reality that is the universe.
Gah!! What are they feeding you poor creatures over here? Cow trough? It must be. I certainly wouldnt stand breating cow shit day in and day out. Oh no, what a horrible mess I've made. Finally a good post from coberst... *sigh*... Kant and his excellency, or should I say his creation....... "By breaking down the" ... we get the picture. We understand the meaning. Good profound post coberst. Your meaning has served you well. May God Bless Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, there is no "soul" , all problems are created by humans themselves with no one else to blame but themselves.
I need to come back to this thread. The fact we are creatures of meaning, that gives meaning, is the core of my studies right now. This thread is my bread and butter, and i am going to make the most of it.
Don't be negative about it. The more people come to realize, the stronger the proposal, or should i say ''truth???'' will become known.
sort of a joke since I think they all lived before me, though i have maintained as much of my own thinking on all that (like, mostly ignoring their writings half intentionally). hard to say if I didn't just read something of kant's a long time ago and I bleat it as translated through my own experience. i don't think so, but wtf is intellectual property anyway. still, those bitches ripped me off... I can tell. :bugeye: i'm not negative about it, i'm just retarded.
Being in the present trumps the past - in several ways. Just because we seem to experience time as moving toward what we call the future from what we call the past is merely perceptive presumption. Perhaps they came to their beliefs because you were coming - a kind of intertemporal meme gravity. You are the cause. I mean, really, the whole idea of causation falls out if, well, everything is causally determined. Then we simply have a flow. And I see no reason to give primacy to the past. They stole from you. They could not help but come up with the ideas - pulled along as they were in your 'wake' - but they could have cited your coming. John the Baptist was not shy. (I realize the above will come off as mere whimsy and perhaps as mocking you. I intend neither. I truly think that for all we know it is precisely like what I said.)
