I feel like I’m coming around to David Hayes’s opinion. The debate with him on the topic of “betterness” continues on, unragingly. Just like I believe there is an objective-ish standard of beauty (one that is based in gene propagation and so is still arbitrary and incidental), I am now starting to believe that there is an objective-ish standard of Meaning, and I feel like I made some non-trivial strides this week in understanding what that might be. (That’s right: The Meaning of Life, revealed exclusively, right here on Wehr in the World. [I hate myself.])
David’s opinion is that it’s compassion. That, for him, is the word that comes closest to describing it. I think that’s close, but I’m going to word it differently and add some clarifications:
We each as individuals have to figure out what we care about / why we care about living. This is going to be different for different people. So different, in fact, that people can care about polar opposite things.
But it seems that what all meanings need to have in common is caring about things outside yourself. That’s not terribly informative because it doesn’t tell you in what direction to care; it only tells you that the care needs to be elevated to something beyond your goofy self.
So far I’ve mostly just been re-stating the definition of Meaning. It gets more interesting, though, when I add some speculative clarifications:
--You don’t need one thing that you care about. It can be many things. And in fact, the things can conflict. Brains are incoherent. Live with it.
--The caring does not have to be limited to humans, but it probably needs to at least be limited [if only indirectly] to forms of life. For example, you might care about noise pollution or light pollution (as I do), but you probably care about these things because of how they affect living things.
--An interesting question to me is, how much of what we care about is under our control? It might not be under our control any more than is our perception of beauty. There are things that we are prone to care about more than others, just by virtue of our genes trying to survive. You can maybe talk yourself into finding some additional beauty or meaning in something, but it seems for the most part objective-ish.
--Except maybe in some weirdo cases, ideas are probably not very care-about-able. If you are in love with ideas, you might be in love with assembling some mental state or personal image. In other words, you’re probably not really caring about things outside yourself.
--Similarly, there is a big difference between caring about people and caring about the idea of people. You might be interested in other people’s ideas, and you might be interested in their style or how they present themselves, but that’s qualitatively different from caring about them, their fears, their confusions, their petty annoyances, their cares.
--Caring about people is very, very different from caring about relationships. If you care about relationships, then you probably care about being charming, about being likeable, about avoiding conflict. But then you just care about acquiring resources or feelings for yourself. I.e., you care about yourself.
--The important kind of caring is done through action. I don't (ahem) care how much you *feel* like you care about someone/something. I'll know it when I see it.
--But at the same time it's important that you *feel* care, and that you (I hate this word) "cultivate" that, because if you don't feel it then it's going to be very, very hard to do it.
--The caring does not have to be this Buddhistical "love everything" crap. In fact, that's probably impossible. You probably *need* to discriminate with who/what you care about. You have to notice things in people/ things that seem special to you. Caring without discrimination seems not just lame, but definitionally impossible.
--The logic of caring outside yourself can be easily misinterpreted as stop caring about yourself. No, caring about yourself is a good thing; in fact, it is probably a necessary thing to being able to care outside yourself. This, to me, is the trickiest and most confusing part of this whole thing, because certain breeds of self-care seem much better than others, but I do not yet know how to succinctly identify the differences.
--The caring does not have to be limited to humans, but it probably needs to at least be limited [if only indirectly] to forms of life. For example, you might care about noise pollution or light pollution (as I do), but you probably care about these things because of how they affect living things.
--An interesting question to me is, how much of what we care about is under our control? It might not be under our control any more than is our perception of beauty. There are things that we are prone to care about more than others, just by virtue of our genes trying to survive. You can maybe talk yourself into finding some additional beauty or meaning in something, but it seems for the most part objective-ish.
--Except maybe in some weirdo cases, ideas are probably not very care-about-able. If you are in love with ideas, you might be in love with assembling some mental state or personal image. In other words, you’re probably not really caring about things outside yourself.
--Similarly, there is a big difference between caring about people and caring about the idea of people. You might be interested in other people’s ideas, and you might be interested in their style or how they present themselves, but that’s qualitatively different from caring about them, their fears, their confusions, their petty annoyances, their cares.
--Caring about people is very, very different from caring about relationships. If you care about relationships, then you probably care about being charming, about being likeable, about avoiding conflict. But then you just care about acquiring resources or feelings for yourself. I.e., you care about yourself.
--The important kind of caring is done through action. I don't (ahem) care how much you *feel* like you care about someone/something. I'll know it when I see it.
--But at the same time it's important that you *feel* care, and that you (I hate this word) "cultivate" that, because if you don't feel it then it's going to be very, very hard to do it.
--The caring does not have to be this Buddhistical "love everything" crap. In fact, that's probably impossible. You probably *need* to discriminate with who/what you care about. You have to notice things in people/ things that seem special to you. Caring without discrimination seems not just lame, but definitionally impossible.
--The logic of caring outside yourself can be easily misinterpreted as stop caring about yourself. No, caring about yourself is a good thing; in fact, it is probably a necessary thing to being able to care outside yourself. This, to me, is the trickiest and most confusing part of this whole thing, because certain breeds of self-care seem much better than others, but I do not yet know how to succinctly identify the differences.
***
Although I said that philosophical ideas are un-care-about-able, and although this post is mostly just a bunch of philosophical ideas, some of these are crude articulations of ideas from William Deresiewicz’s book A Jane Austen Education that happened to move me very deeply, and I’ll post the more eloquent articulations in next few days. It is exceedingly rare that an idea can move me to the point of eye wetness, but the ideas in this book have been doing it with regularity. Never have my intellectual cherries been so intensely rung. I am not the type who typically makes noises as he reads, but multiple times I have found myself impulsively saying out loud, “oh my God, this book is fucking killing me”—in a good way!
