Every young person I talk to seems to be in the thrall of ideas like "we make our own meaning in life" and "everything...

I don't know how well read you are, but in case it wasn't clear by my picture I was referring to Kierkegaard's early authorship, particularly Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. You can get the gist of it from the wikipedia if you want. Hope you enjoy Kierkegaard as much as I do.

Why would believing that "we make our own meaning in life" necessarily lead to believing that the only thing that matters is happiness and comfort? I believe that we make our own meaning and happiness and comfort are definitely not the most important things in my life. Seems to me like you're not exploring a very large part of ideaspace desu.

>not wanting to work makes you a commie
I'm conflicted about this
On one hand, it's excellent for making fun of communists
On the other, it just don't make no sense

Somewhat related: anyone else noticed that amerimutts are experiencing with a 60-70 years delay all the intellectual currents of the past century of Europe (existentialism, marxism, fascism etc)?

I believe Ben Shapiro has made a similar observation. Robert Pirsig also makes a similar observation in Lila iirc.

Carl G. Jung devoted a good chunk of his life to this. Nietzche was stuck on this problem, and Jung spent a lot of his life trying to answer that question. I have been told he succeed by some, from what I read he certainly has a lot intelligent to say about it.

I'd suggest starting with "The Origins and History of Consciousness" by Erich Neuman and then "Maps of Meaning" by Jordan Peterson. After that just start tearing into Jung's collected works.

You're looking for the Bible, old man.

I frequently post this image, but I do so ironically because I think it is hilarious to misrepresent Kierkegaard this bad. The quote itself doesn't even address "not wanting to work", but rather that there must be more to life than working, directly contrary to Marx who reduces life to class struggle and production/consumption.

Unfortunately, the creator of this image was quite serious though, which is unfortunate, and why I mock him by posting it so often. Oh how Kierkegaard would dislike the Krumby Kierkegaard Meme Facebook page. Where his authorship is 'leveled' to the lowest common denominator so that the admin can get likes for mentioning, yet again, the teleological suspension of the ethical, and everyone guffaw's because they've seen the phrase before and are in the 'in' crowd. But like Kierk says, truth is always to be found in the minority, and if by chance, the minority becomes the majority, then truth is once more found in the minority.

Op, their problem isn't in any quest, or tied up in an event, action or object, their problem resides within linguistics. It's very easy for them to become enchanted with the Platonic idea of forms or in the notion that things have an inherent essence. Just like cars, the word 'meaning' has been created by people. It's been given a definition and attributes and treated as if it jumps out from the dictionary and engulfs the objects and events or nestles within them, when really it remains firmly on the page. They make the mistake of thinking there really IS meaning as opposed to just there IS itself. The problem gets more complex, and rather sad, when they do the opposite and conclude that things are without meaning, and risk sinking into a swamp of nihilism. The application of meaning and meaninglessness is often misunderstood, and they seldom see that in both cases the crucial thing was the application itself. Meaning is not within the material, it's not a property of the material, neither is it a property the material is bereft or deprived of, meaning is a clever structure that lives inside a semiotic system. In short, it is a word we have created in our mental oil painting of reality and the youth get puzzled and frustrated when they compare their painting to the reality they have painted and find the two are not identical; that meaning lives exclusively in the painting, as an idea, and not in the reality painted. It's much easier for them to see their mental paintings are not the world around them when explaining a Leprechaun, for a leprechaun is a physical entity, but more difficult when explaining an intangible concept like meaning.

sounds like relativism. I recommend the Greeks, especially Socrates as a way to work through the problems of relativism. I don't think you'll find anything that "refutes" existentialism though. The postmodern cat is out of the bag. We have to find our way forward now before more confident ideologies and doctrines take over the western project

>Old man
I'm 22

Because if you believe you make your own meaning and anything is a viable avenue to meaning then you are really just looking for what justifies a lifestyle that feels good to you. All the people I know who espouse that philosophy don't do anything, don't have interesting thoughs, and consume children's media.

Thank you for your thoughtful and well-articulated response.

seriously... it’s so fucking stupid

>it seems to me that if you follow that line of thinking that the only thing that matters to you is 'happiness' or 'comfort'.
no. your post is flat out retarded.

We should be saying follow your dreams only after you esablish a source of sustainable income, but earned leisure is a tough sell over effortless hedonism.

Complaining about a naive world-view or the natural consciousness is masturbatory and a poor attempt to externalize and give force to one's own vague notions
of this or that - as if the opinion held is somehow superior despite being just as hazy and inchoate.

> if you follow that line of thinking that the only thing that matters to you is 'happiness' or 'comfort'

This is Aristotle's claim, for different reasons, in Nicomachean Ethics and only shows you did not seriously consider a concept on it's own merit or logic.
You are trying to find arguments you already think are right - but the products of serious thought cannot be divided from its method, which is what you seem
to be unintentionally doing.

What if following my only dreams require me to risk not having a stable source of income?

Everything is meaningful
It is part of a tapestry of beauty, envisioned by a supreme infinite eternal limitless intelligence.

Beauty. That's what it is. That's it's point, its meaning. It cannot be explained, only perceived, experienced.

Well, most of the human experience IS subjective. Objectivity is truth, it is what happens, but humanity is not all-knowing.
Anybody can ascribe whatever meaning they want to anything in life, it's not hard. Poets do it all the time, it's called "inspiration".

I'd say that the Norse myths of the Poetic/Prose Edda, mostly concerning Ragnarok, might be of interest. It teaches that, although we do not have free will and everything is determined and inescapable, it does not require nihilism and apathy. Unlike the Aesir, we do not know our futures and must go into the unknown until we achieve our ultimate fate.

This. Exactly this.

Meaning is just a linguistic construct and not an attribute of reality.

There isn't anything that has meaning, but there isn't anything that's meaningless either. Meaning is just another word we have invented. We can play around with the word while describing reality, but we can't shoehorn it into reality because it's not found there. It's only found in our linguistic playground.

Bloody post modernists.

You should look up Peterson's reading list. Nietzsche in particular. Here, watch his latest video, it deals directly with what you mention and is directly linked with famous authors, ideas, and stories.
youtu.be/kteHW6t4G0g

Hahah. As soon as I saw
>Bloody post modernists.
I thought, "God, I bet this fool has bought Peterson's Atheist-Christian-Jung ideology." Then saw
>You should look up Peterson's...

He is dancing with Leprechauns. It is probably best to just ignore this all together.

>learning about ideologies that dominated the previous century
Yeah. So dumb.

seriously it's like clockwork at this point

Both of you get off this board, just go to Veeky Forums it's for posters just like you

s-so THIS is the overman?!

go on...

"Meaning" is largely just a buzzword that you should dodge until someone spells out what they're using the word for, rigorously. Usually what's really challenged is the idea of objective, pre-written "purpose" in anything.

>And it seems to me that if you follow that line of thinking that the only thing that matters to you is 'happiness' or 'comfort'.
Are you trying to imply that 'happiness' and 'comfort' are interchangeable here?

I guess I'm a big postmodernist faggot or something, but I don't understand the hunger people have for a "natural/organic" truth of some kid. Let's say we had "the book," which tells us exactly what the perfect moral life it. I'm convinced that the first page of such a book would say "burn this book," and that reading the rest of it would make its requirements impossible to fulfill. Think of life like a math test or something: if you were to have an answer key, the test immediately loses any purpose it might have had. If someone knows what the written-in-stone right choice is, then all of their moral decisions get boiled down to just "following directions" no matter what they do. It feels like an attack on my agency, by which I mean not simply my right to choose, but my actual ability to do so. So then the question remains, "Why seek such a book?". I know you're going to say that the book's there whether I seek it or not, but if you can't answer that "Why?" then by extension you can't answer any other.

As for hedonists, they're retarded. Basically the "safe-hedonist" argument is just "Well, empirically, we figure out what people want by looking at their behavior and seeing what they choose and what they don't want by what they avoid, so analytically you always choose what you want and avoid what you don't." It's not wrong, but I could just as easily say "everything is either a potato or not a potato"; it doesn't mean shit. It's just a linguistic hijack used to generate a stupid tautology at the cost of all nuance and distinction. I'll admit that it's technically true that everything is either a potato or not a potato, but if someone asks me "Hey how'd you get to work today?" I'd be a fucking idiot to reply "oh yeah I just uhhh rode here in my not-potato, haha." It's obviously just dodging the question.

It's enough for me to see their faces to remember how much I despise DeGrasse Tyson, Nye, and Krauss. Dawkins is okay because he coined the word 'meme'.

>Dawkins
Sounds fair enough

>That Lawrence Krauss quote
>Lawrence Krauss, author of "The Physics of Star Trec"
a complete fucking dipshit

>Nye
He's not wrong to imply that words like "authentic" are bound up in sophistry, plenty of philosophers are keen to that as well. Definitely the best quote on the righthand side, and honestly a pretty good one despite the fact that he's clearly not as well versed in what he's talking about as shrodinger is. I feel like he has some kind of grasp of phenomenology or something.

>Tyson
Sounds shallow here, but not as dumb as the Krauss line.

that’s not what I was talking about, I mean the indignity of having to experience everything second hand

>don't do anything
I work extremely hard, and am addicted to exercise and self-improvement through philosophy.
>don't have interesting thoughts
I think I have interesting thoughts, though you may think this is subjective. At the very least I think the fact that I disagree with the cliched "if you believe you make your own meaning you fall into a distinct type of person" idea makes me more creative than you
>and consume children's media.

I don't watch tv, don't play video games, and don't watch movies. Try again.

Like I said before, you're not really thinking creatively, you're just sticking to tired cliches.

The linguistic playground is reality you psueds. Reality is just the story your brain tells itself that's coherent enough for you to make decisions. That story is a black box we don't understand, but language is a huge part of it. If something lacks meaning to you, then it doesn't exist in reality because your brain will automatically shut it out. What reality is there that's divorced from language, and how do you know anything about it? It's a fiction, also constructed by language. You're not taking your own assumptions far enough. Everything is a language game, but there's no escaping it. You're trapped it in forever till you die. Nothing else exists.

>The linguistic playground is reality you psueds. Reality is just the story your brain tells itself that's coherent enough for you to make decisions.
t. pseud

>The linguistic playground is reality you psueds

Not that guy, but, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe;" the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. The linguistic structures we use to describe reality must not be confused with reality itself... Reality is objective, it is a fixed way regardless of us. Our description of reality is founded upon billions of statements, and here is why the distinction is important, because all of them must remain potentially falsifiable. Newton's gravity is not gravity itself, it is a description of gravity. It accurately predicts the actions of objects. But it is a description, which is why Einstein's different description was able to predict the movements of objects with immense mass like planets with a higher degree of accuracy. Both made descriptions of reality, one appeared more accurate. I'm guessing you mean that linguistics occurs 'within' reality, and you would be right, but you mustn't confuse reality itself with our enormous intersubjective linguistic description of reality. It gets more complicated when one stops describing pens and cars and begins describing something beautiful or evil.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer’s head. There’s also Rick’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they’re not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Morty truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Rick’s existential catchphrase “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev’s Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon’s genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Morty tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

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Reality is level 1. By the time it gets encapsulated as a description of reality at a higher level, it is not reality any more.

I agree you shouldn't confuse the map with the territory. But the only access you have to the territory is through a map. We can construct other maps on top of it, but we are stuck in a map. If we change our map, it changes the territory. They interact with each other. Now it's a convoluted analogy.

You are stuck in your own conciousness, and there are thoughts appearing in it constantly. You see objects instead of a random blur of colors because you have a linguistic map of meaning that parses reality into useful tools. There's no such thing as a tree, it's just a bunch of atoms bouncing around in a pattern. A tree is us noticing the pattern and naming it. We can't experience it without the name.

Level 1 is just an imaginary construct of level 4. You will never have direct access to it, because that's impossible. The universe without an observer doesn't exist.

I don't know why, but I hate this guy and find him creepy as fuck. I usually don't care about celebrities, but for some reason I get a rise out of him. I'm so glad he's going to be #metoo'd.

What the fuck is this MS Paint 5th grade """philosophy"""?

Its author is correct in observing unfolding levels of abstraction, but this should be a chart moving from material towards language/thought.

An organism doesn't think about its environment and then produce a newspaper. Newspaper (or a simple broadsheet posted in the town square) production requires:

-multiple subjects
-a common language
-a writing technology
-a system of material reproduction for that writing technology

Which is leagues of complication between the neuron cartoons and the man reading the newspaper. In fact its this whole mess that gets brushed aside in contemporary descriptions of human consciousness (sensations, thoughts, more abstract thoughts, yada yada yada, human experience)

Ahhh, Franco, the wisest philosopher of our era.

>I feel like he has some kind of grasp of phenomenology or something.
i know what you're saying, but i guarantee Nye didn't have heidegger or husserl or sartre in mind while saying that. i think he probably just heard some idea about external world skepticism and automatically rejected it

>What the fuck is this MS Paint 5th grade """philosophy
That picture is an over-simplified one because the original is too abstract. It has dense doorstopper textbook to unpack it called, 'Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems' The original was drawn by Alfred Korzybski, along with the famous pic related 'the map is not the territory' that Houllebecq and others wrote books after, and many others famous ideas Derrida and Faucault stole and abused. .... There's a great anecdote about one of his famous speeches. I think it was either Arthur C Clarke or William Burroughs in the crowd to see him. Korzybski was mumbling something about how people eat words and language as well as food, then pulled out a packet of biscuits in a brown bag and started eating them. He apologised for crunching into the microphone, said he missed breakfast, and ate another one. Apologised again, and made a joke of offering some to a few girls in the front row. As they were chewing them and about to swallow, he casually pulled the packet from the bag and announced that they were dog biscuits. One of the girls vomited. Korzybski laughed and said, 'that's what I mean, people eat words as much as food.'

...

>I could hunt for answers in my toilet but that wouldn't be meaningful just because I thought it was.
You suppose those people have the imagination or the intelligence to even think that, or the courage require to allow themselves to. Their use of the word "subjective" is only a means of self-defense, a codeword used due to extenuation or to avoid the tacit violence that is a constant in our social conditions. It's just their opinion, after all, which means it doesn't really matter to you, it's not your business, keep off them, do not question their tastes, which are different for every single individual of the species homo sapiens, but please don't say those things you know you shouldn't say.

Read yourself some Adorno, Bakhtin, Hegel.

>You can make your own purpose, but by the time you die you'll just regret it and wish you had focused on something else. The grass is always greener on the other side.
don't call people children when you talk like one yourself

The thesaurus is my least favorite dinosaur.

I don't think he has, but he explores all that fruity liberal gender stuff so there's no way he hasn't at least interacted with people who have. Generally the sort of softcore argument I get for things like transexuality and the sex/gender distinction is like this: if you put your hand on a table, and it feels like a stove, then table or not, it simply "does" feel like a stove on the surface of your perception, and unless you can solve the mind-body problem there's got to be some physical thing responsible for that within your body, ergo it's "beyond make believe". Maybe that line of thought is a little shortsighted in some regards, but right or wrong, there are still certain things which you'd need to be able to grasp in order to even articulate that argument in the first place.

Or maybe I'm grasping at straws and that comment of his doesn't really relate to how he justifies his beliefs, it's not like I actually watch Bill Nye.

Deep down I'm really just tired of grad students who think they should be revered as the next Einstein for their sick deeps. It's annoying for the same reason "wow culture was so great back in the 90's haha!" is annoying. The past is always going to look more elite because the bottom gets trimmed off; there hasn't been a fall from grace, not a catastrophic one at least. It's like hearing someone boohoo about how Ulysses 2 Revengance: a novel will never be a thing just because contemporary lit in-aggregate doesn't measure up to the best hand-picked authors from all of the previous eras.

>Ulysses 2 Revengance: a novel
But that was already Finnegan/s Wake, down to not understanding what made the original good.

> Want to recommend a book
> Searches for cover
> Find Talk on youtube
youtube.com/watch?v=XQmf2cLgkJg
> Transcription of said talk
peterkreeft.com/audio/05_relativism/relativism_transcription.htm
> PDF of the book
portalconservador.com/livros/Peter-Kreeft-A-Refutation-of-Moral-Relativism.pdf

Check A Refutation of Moral Relativism, by Peter Kreeft

>I'm not a learned man, but I trust my intuition. And it seems to me that if you follow that line of thinking that the only thing that matters to you is 'happiness' or 'comfort'.
>Posts to a literature board.
>Explains that his worldview is constructed around a vehement refusal to read when confronted with ideas.
Get off my board.