I’ve been thinking about the necessity of deciding for ourselves what we mean by meaning in life. It really does require a personal investment of deciding what it means and how best to describe it from within our experience. Protestations that terms are not well enough defined miss the point. This in my reading in TMWT last night takes pains to elaborate why that should be.
PRECISION VS ACCURACY
Earlier I made a distinction between precision, which literally means cutting something off too soon, and accuracy, the literal meaning of which is to exhibit due care towards the subject of concern. Rationality, the left hemisphere’s version of reason, demands we be precise, otherwise (so it believes) meaning will escape. Thus philosophy has taken to mimicking science. Yet meaning is not increased – more often diminished – by the process, and all that is achieved is a lack of flexibility. There is a kind and a degree of reaching after precision, clarity and rigour which is misplaced, because its subject becomes more and more tenuous as this process continues. It ends in a kind of increasingly unrewarding pedantry, reminiscent of an anorexic’s attempt to split a pea rather than swallow it. The attempt is to over-clarify an area that intrinsically does not permit it. ‘It is the mark of an educated man’, wrote Aristotle, ‘to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits’.
Human affairs are a case in point. Knowledge of something that is by its nature not precise will itself have to be imprecise, if it is to be accurate. Aristotle again: ‘For when the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite … the decree is adapted to the facts.’ In the same vein, Whitehead writes:
There is a conventional view of experience, never admitted when explicitly challenged, but persistently lurking in the tacit presuppositions. This view conceives conscious experience as a clear-cut knowledge of clear-cut items with clear-cut connections with each other. This is the conception of a trim, tidy, finite experience uniformly illuminated. No notion could be further from the truth.
We all recognize the value of pinning things down where possible where expedience is desirable. But do we also recognize the need not to pin things down in human affairs when doing so would so badly distort what we are talking about? @Kendel, I think you’ve done a good job of articulating what can be to be helpful while pointing to the need to each take it from there as best we can. An assemblage of someone else’s meaningful words will not always mean anything for someone else.