Table of Contents

1. Eternalism and Nihilism
2. Nested Patterns of Meaning
3. Loosely Connected Meanings
4. A Third Way to Destroy Meaning
5. Meaning Upon Meaning
6. Laughing at Nihilism
7. This Essay is a Waste of Time
8. Sources

Alvy Singer: Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart, and that will be the end of everything.

Mrs. Singer: What is that your business? He’s stopped doing his homework.

Alvy Singer: What’s the point?

Mrs. Singer: What has the universe got to do with it. You’re here, in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding.

Dr. Flicker: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we’re here. Huh? Huh? Huh?

Eternalism and Nihilism

For several years I was a nihilist, without knowing it. This was a fairly rough way to live. I would seize at the latest project to inspire me - a personality failing of mine at the best of times - only to gloomily watch its promise fade.

Had you asked me at the time, I’d have said something like this: To find meaning, we must act within an inspiring story that makes sense to us. However, all our societal frames of meaning are subjective - or intersubjective - and mutually created fictions that guide us. When we see through these fictions, they don’t inspire us anymore.

As a result we have to keep finding larger fictions, grander societal stories, to guide our achievements. Extending life, colonizing Mars! Such meanings are also agreed-upon fictions, but the stories are large enough for us to fool ourselves, at least for a time.

My almost-unconscious philosophy here was not unsophisticated, but dissatisfying, and you can see how I’d cycle down into despair before revving myself up again.

Honestly, maybe most secular people today feel this attitude to some degree. Considered sub specie aeternitatis, goes the story, our life is meaningless. Our sense of meaning is false, illusory, but at least it’s there.

This argument can be expressed in a syllogism, like so:

(A) Compared to the cosmos, we are insignificant.

(B) Unless we matter to the cosmos, life is meaningless.

(C) Therefore, our lives are meaningless.

Few philosphers make explicit this second step, skipping straight from (A) to (C), turning our syllogism into an enthymeme. Probably they skip the all-important second step because it does not occur to them to question it.

Nested Patterns of Meaning

A precious few have weighed and found wanting this second step. Before I join them in gleefully attacking it - and describing a better way to approach a sense of meaning - I want to defend it.

Meanings can form a sort of pattern language. In architecture, software design, city planning, and lifestyle choices, multiple patterns fit together more or less well, and they have to fit within larger patterns.

Suppose I enjoy the small ritual of brewing and drinking coffee: the drip of rich liquid as water filters through the grounds, the pouring of the brewed coffee into fine porcelain, the wafting of luxurious steam above the cup, the peaceful sinking into a reclined position, the cautious sipping and cupping.

I feel the pleasures of all these sensations and more, and together they form a ritual I feel is meaningful. What it means, and how long or how deeply I feel the meaning, are different matters.

Regardless, what it means for me to enjoy a cup of coffee is related to what it means for me to be sitting here working, and that might be related to providing for my family or achieving certain goals in life. The coffee ritual’s meaning might be nested within other meanings.

If the larger meaning turns out to be a waste of time, then the meanings which supported and were supported by that larger meaning are now threatened. Serving my wife coffee in bed means little if she plans to divorce me in the afternoon. The pleasure comes from the sense of closeness and love, and later this will be revealed to be illusory.

Nested meanings are vulnerable to disruption from larger surrounding meanings.

Our very reasonable fear that a nested meaning might be destroyed by the failure of a surrounding meaning can lead us to assume that all meanings are nested. It is a sort of reflex. Much of our sense of personal meaning comes from our personal relationships, and our fellow humans are fickle and hard to know (witness: gossip, self-deception, binding mechanisms such as marriage, etc). If unbeknownst to us the relationship is not all it seems, we will find ourselves upended.

The vulnerability of nested meanings creates a boomerang effect: if you conclude the universe has no meaning, you may feel a sense of despair in your day-to-day life. Out there, the cosmic void, feels meaningless, and this emptiness immediately boomerangs all the way back home, in here.

Loosely Connected Meanings

The fact that many meanings form interlocking and nesting patterns doesn’t mean all meanings do, though.

David Chapman says somewhere that after the grand narratives all collapsed (God, Western Civilization, Progress, Reason), eventually many people noticed that other meanings continued to work quite well. I’d rephrase: many people noticed that most patterns of meaning are not strongly tied to each other.

Now, in the short run, smaller meanings can be ruined by larger meanings even when they are not logically connected. After the death of a loved one, the sun goes on shining as cheerfully as ever, and this feels like a mockery, or even a betrayal.

But the pleasures of sunshine and the sorrow of loss have nothing to do with each other, intrinsically, though this is hard to observe in the shattering aftermath of a large emotional event.

With time, we learn that the fate of empires doesn’t make this particular meal or flower, or whatever, any more or less enjoyable. In the heat of the moment, consumed by grief, or ambition, all other meanings may fade. But that is an accident of our brains, in that we can’t think of more than one thing at a time. Wait a while, and whatever relationship you had with the piece of nature will re-emerge. Life goes on.

The trick is to notice that adjacent meanings continue on their merry way. Meanings are not coupled so tightly together as all that. It’s a network, not a house of cards.

This is what nihilism, existentialism, and the various eternalisms all deny. All meaning, they say, is bound together tightly. Either it is all completely subjective and hence illusory, or all completely objective, and furthermore it all depends on the largest pattern there is (or is not).

The existentialist must keep in mind the need to create meaning, since it’s all subjective. The eternalist must keep in mind the connection to the ultimate source of meaning.

This is why Christians and Marxists (or environmentalists or anyone with a bee in their bonnet) can sometimes sound like a broken record. They want to appreciate all the meanings in life, as we all do, and so they connect them all to the ultimate objective source of meaning.

A Third Way to Destroy Meaning

The eternalists of various stripes lose their taste for the smaller pleasures of life, and often ruin the smaller meanings. I have already mentioned two ways in which a larger meaning can ruin a smaller meaning: when the smaller meaning is actually nested within the larger meaning, and when we are distraught by the loss of a larger or at least more emotionally-salient meaning. A third way to ruin a smaller meaning is to tie together meanings that should be independent of each other.

Those with a particular passion for the larger story, like environmentalism or Christianity or Marxism, often condemn those who talk too much about something else. These people have an addiction to a specific and intense form of meaning. They need a bump, a hit, if they go too long without it.

They may feel guilty for caring about non-eternal matters too much. How can I enjoy a pastry when the proletariat continue to suffer, or (an effective altruist might feel) when children are starving in Africa? These people, as I say, have lost a certain taste for the smaller pleasures in life.

After a while this tic gets to be somewhat trying. If every time you admired a painting you were told this is but a pale reflection of the infinite love and beauty of God, you might begin to feel a little peeved. Yes, that’s all very well, but I am trying to appreciate the subtle nuances of this particular painting.

Seen in this way, a higher, larger, or more extreme meaning may mar an ordinary meaning. It is like shining a floodlamp on a candlelit dinner. The subtle shadows and ambience are replaced by harsh shadows and glare.

Meaning Upon Meaning

Straitjacketing meaning not only is too rigid, for someone used to more flexible and multitudinuous sources of meaning, it is even distorting. When we release our attachment to the artificial light of a single transcendent source of meaning, we may find the twilight play of subtle shadows more complex and more satisfying.

The materialist polytheist, so to speak, does not have less meaning than the ideologue or religious. She has access to more, and better. I did not know this for the several years after I deconverted.

The way to access all these many overlapping or independent or contradictory meanings is simply to notice them, without holding on to them. Why does the ritual of coffee feel satisfying? Who knows?

Nor can the ritual of coffee substitute for other sources of meaning. It is like a bridge, which will not bear too heavy a load. Drive on and keep going.

Try to stand upon the still water and you’ll find that the supporting foundation is gone. These moments of sport are like that. When you are in the midst of them, riding the wave, they carry you along and give meaning to life.

We sense meaning with finger-feeling, fingerspitzengefühl. The meaning waxes and wanes in importance. We cannot force it to remain in place. Nor, often, can we precisely define or express it. The sensed meaning often remains irreducibly confusing, in a particularly annoying way.

Gautama’s definition of life as dukkha is often translated as suffering but is better translated as dissatisfying, and the confusing, transitory qualities of meaningful experience contribute no small part of the dukkha of life.

Experiencing many small meanings, in a highly context-dependent way, becomes a skill, an appreciation and cultivation of many forms of excellence.

“These skills are manifold: the skill for knowing how to pick exactly the right coffee, exactly the right cup, exactly the right place to drink it, and to cultivate exactly the right companions to drink it with.”

And at its height the practice of this skill of appreciation for the fine and subtle meanings of life approaches a sort of polytheist, materialist sense of the sacred:

The proper performance of the ritual is therefore motivated by, but also reinforces and strengthens, a deep commitment to the basic Homeric sense of the sacred: that it is the highest form of human excellence to recognize, be amazed by, and be grateful for whatever it is that draws you to act at your best.

Laughing at Nihilism

We are now ready to return to the contempt with which Chapman and others regard existentialist nihilism. The fact that most patterns of meaning interlock with other patterns only loosely if at all, and usually do not nest within larger patterns of meanings, implies that our meaninglessness to the cosmos doesn’t boomerang back home.

What does our eventual death and atom-like proportion to the rest of the universe matter to the grand sweep of human history, to our projects and ambitions, to the lunch meeting with friends, to the baby in the cradle?

We can gaze peacefully at aeons of time and space without lapsing into despairing nihilism. The two have not much to do with each other.

Put another way, it’s unclear why a witness with all of space and time in its view would suppose that a human scale would not matter to a human. Human meaning is human-sized.

Put a third way, if I don’t matter to the cosmos, why should the cosmos’ opinion of me matter to me? What you do as you read this does not matter to me, and yet my indifference doesn’t destroy your purpose and enjoyment of life (I hope). Why should the cosmic observer’s indifference affect us any more?

The more and longer you observe that most meanings stand independent of one another, the more absurd becomes the notion that the vastness of space destroys the many rippling meanings that make up a worthwhile human life.

This Essay is a Waste of Time

One notable distinction between the philosophy I’m articulating now, and religious or existentialist philosphies, is that you need the latter, by their lights, but if you don’t read mine you will be fine.

That is, if you read the old virtue philosophers, or religious or Marxist philosophers, they say that you very much need their teachings. You need to know about the ultimate source of meaning and how to engage with it in order to develop a soul, to act righteously and with value, to have a life that means anything at all. To be cut off from that sort of philosophy is a great loss.

But with mine, you can live many sorts of lives, and as long as you allow yourself to engage with multiple meanings deeply, you will live a meaningful life. You don’t need to read (or to remember) this essay.

Similarly, Richard Rorty thought his work was prophylactic: it could help cure or immunize people against the work of other philosophers, but past that it was mainly a form of literature. He didn’t share the grand Platonic ambitions of the Chicago school of his youth; he was not out to help his students form a soul. It’s a humble rendition of the philosopher’s work.

Indeed, my argument here will sound and should sound rather banal to many people raised with a comfortably ambiguous attitude toward various religions and philosophies: atheists and agnostics who sing hymns in gorgeous cathedrals and wish everyone Merry Christmas, strong feminists who are the M in S&M, passionate humanitarians who joke Douglas-Adams-style about the meaninglessness of it all, romantics who do math and rationalists who do ritual.

Overlapping and contradictory meanings don’t bother them, and nor should they.

As Rorty notes, when foundationalists demand a granite foundation for the exercise of reason, the most effective response is to change the subject. Similarly, when eternalists demand the experience of meaning be grounded in a Platonic space, the most direct answer is a Johnsonian one: kick your foot against meaning - I refute you thus.

Put more plainly, the brute fact that meaning exists without an ultimate grounding refutes the argument that it requires such a grounding. Can you really, just by deciding to, find an activity meaningless, or suddenly meaningful? How meaningful an event or activity or object feels is a function of an interplay between you and everyone around you and what’s happening in the real world.

Nevertheless, this philosophy has helped me in a work-a-day manner. Meanings are real and the world is rich with them. Knowing they are not mere illusions - the nihilist heart of existentialism - is helpful. And it has helped me think about finding and crafting meanings.

I can avoid trying to impose meanings, and avoid trying to discover meaning via deduction, connecting all things into a correct picture or better model. That isn’t how meaning is found. You find it through experience, achieving insight mostly ex post facto.

Finally, film, theatre, stories, become more important, because there are so many meanings to experience and to work out.

This contemporary Polytheistic world will be a wonderful world of sacred shining things.

Sources

All quotations above are from All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, which is flawed but worth reading.

David Chapman’s diagnosis of the eternalist-nihilist cycle, typical of those in what he dubs Kegan’s Stage 4.5, broke me out of it.

For the point that if we don’t matter to a cosmic observer, neither should the cosmic observer’s opinion matter to us, I am indebted to a paper by a Chinese doctoral student studying in Dallas, if memory serves, but which I cannot now find.

Nagel on the Absurd is a classic in the field, if you are looking for further reading.