Before we have taken a step... - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Before we have taken a step...

...on the path to wisdom, what baggage do we carry with us? Is it possible to lighten the burden we have had limbered upon us, from parental teaching, from state schools, from utopian propaganda solutions (advertising), from entertainment, and from the structure of thought we are born into, known as our culture! I think so.

Crossing cultures to understand our own

To try and understand ourselves we should strive to understand others, to create a contrast of our similarities and differences. The cultural barriers that threaten this understanding are great, but not impassable. We run the risk of imposing our world view on another culture (an intellectual violence) if we are too arrogant and of exoticizing them if we are too romantic.

  It is a challenge, but one that is worth it. For initially we will look upon the cultural mirror of another from a western mindset, but as we grow more familiar with 'the other side' through our interpretation of their ideas, we can start to think like 'the other side', and soon it is not so unfamiliar!

Here are two simple examples of how understanding chinese philosophy can help us realize ourselves and expand our minds.

  The alphabetic greek language was more suited to abstract thinking and the development of theory, whereas the pictoral chinese language lent itself to creating 'concrete images'. Now at present I do not understand chinese and so cannot say how the language conditions a person to think in a different way, yet I can realize through this that our way of doing things is not the only way, and that if I were to learn a pictographic language my mind could be greatly expanded (and vice versa).

  The second example concerns a thinker considered the father of western philosophy - Plato. The great man would have us lost in a cave, staring at shadows on a wall created by the light behind us. We are ignorant creatures by birth, who require an understanding of perfect transcendent forms  (beyond our mundane realm) to gain true knowledge and to stare at the light at the mouth of the cave. There is in the west a distinction between two absolutes, two great opposites; in this case ignorance and knowledge. This highlights a general theme of the western human, as an unsettled creature within nature, unable to trust itself and searching for proof of truth beyond itself. The briefest look at chinese philosophy on the other hand, will reveal a mindset of belonging to nature, of being a part of nature. Yin and Yang are one combined whole. There is no cave here and no need to 'discover' transcendent forms because the thinker has already taken it for granted that we are already part of any greater philosophical truth.

  By realizing that people think differently, we can see the 'intellectual strings' dangling above our heads and feel that our freedom is actually closer to puppethood, as we have accepted so much as obvious, that is not so obvious after all. Not everyone in the world takes for granted what we do - and we do not take for granted what they do!

Forward is not quite so simple...

Before we have taken a single step how many have we taken backwards?

- Dogmatic thinking (of an optimistic or pessimistic nature) funnels truth into perverse shapes and moulds the world around an idea, rather than moulding an idea around the world.

 

- We must constantly be on guard - against ourselves! Forever renewing or discarding old contracts and interpreting ourselves in a new way every so often can be an effective defence against our prejudices.

 

- Just observing things as they are is an exciting philosophical adventure and impossible to take for granted: Are you seeing things that exist outside of you, or are they only given solidity by your observing them (are they even there at all, or a creation of our minds?). It is so complex, so many layers surround everything.

 

-To get to the stage we are at now, we had to overcome superstition - our default world view was not - 'it is what it is', but 'it is because some supernatural force made it so'.

- How many of us think we are better than everyone else, for having some special piece of information?

More importantly, where are all of these threads leading to! It is time to knot them together. The truth of the matter is we are all sometimes victims of self-deception, and we have all been branded by hideous stamping machines trying to convince us to move in certain directions at the threat of force, religious doom, social exclusion, and so on.

  Before we can take a single step on the path to wisdom we must realize this weight of baggage upon our backs. Is it discardable? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? That is for you to decide.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

The Limitations of Freedom - By Sean Ash

The Limitations of Freedom

 To understand the path to absolute freedom, it is paramount for the individual to first understand 'what is prison?'. If freedom is to become more tangible where it is completely understood and fully employed then one must first experience and undergo the greatest extents of captivity. This is because one must experience being held captive so that they can truly understand what freedom truly is in its entirety. It is exactly the same principle applied for one experiencing life to understand death. If you have not yet existed, you cannot understand life. Just because someone knows the culture in the West and has read of the culture in the East, it does not necessarily mean they will absolutely know the culture in the East. They will know and understand some truths but never the absolute Truth. It is the same for those of the educated; one is simply not born educated but they become educated. Ergo, one must first be uneducated to be educated; unconscious to be conscious and dead to be alive. Being 'not' something is imperative to becoming something. There has to be space to find movement.

      This same principle can be applied to absolutely anything and everything because it is a principle that works in every case. For words it is the synonym and antonym as a dialectical process to the synthesis of synantononym. Clearly there is no definition of 'synantononym' and it is the same with the after life; we prescribe our own beliefs as to what it might mean. It is possible that absolutely anything could be ascribed to this word. However, it would deduct the blood line from which it came. Therefore, it can only come to life through the genes of both parents, and something that represents two different things. The after life must then be a make up of both metaphysical and physical as we are moving forward in time and not backwards. If evolution is the case, it makes no sense going back to a state we have already existed in as it is not productive and contradicts any purpose of movement thus making it arbitrary. Therefore, if purpose is to be Truth, then it can only manifest our moving from non-existence to existence which means that within the third must exist both. This means that when we die, we are made up of both existence and non-existence at the same time. We will no longer B(-eing) but we will C (see).

      For many, freedom is something that is fought for on many battle fields but freedom cannot be truly explained or put into place and it never will. It simply cannot function here. It is like a man going into space without a space suit. Freedom cannot exist here in this reality as it simply does not belong here. It would be like looking around and trying to find God. We have the concepts of such things, that is true, but we must await the next life to find the answers. As for now, we simply make the answers up so that we can put to rest dead-end philosophy. Dead-end philosophy is a type of philosophy that simply cannot be answered as it is like starting at a point of A to then ending back at A without ever reaching B, and B does exactly the same so that no truths ever clash. They have only stayed within their own prison cells to remain live.

      To end, man lives out his life trying to escape the inevitable. He has the freedom in his sight only he does not have a clue what it truly looks like, what it feels like to have and what such a word could mean. It is a contested concept that can only ever be explained outside the walls of prison. We are prisoners to our own bodies while we live in this reality and so we can only ever experience a state of freedom when we are dead. For those that convince themselves to be either governors or prisoners in life, whatever you should convince yourself to be in this life you shall be the opposite in the next. It's not so bad being a prisoner, should this be the case, just as it is not so bad to experience darkness as the only thing that can possibly come from it is freedom and light.

By Sean Ash

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

A young girls dream

When I was a little girl

I decided I was to save the world

I felt others pain and sadness

And that our society was subject to madness

Yet as a child I had no means

No idea how, nor any money in my jeans

But knew the journey I would take

And the decisions I would make

When I arrived at puberty

Quickly everything became about me

The latest fashion was my obsession

And my happiness was determined by possessions

But it did not take long to realize

That these ideals were lies

And that the dream around me

Had been created by the enemy

Then a number of circumstances

Were to sabotage my chances

But a skein I grabbed onto

And unraveled some helpful clues

I pieced them together

I forgot I was so clever

And the picture was philosophy

And it was intended for me

Anon, I travelled this path

And rekindled my ability to laugh

At what was so much nonsense?

But slowly made more and more sense

But locked in a lingual cage

That had been kept secret from age to age

How would one steal?

This truth to then reveal

This is how I would save the world

The dream I prophesized as a little girl

To bring philosophy to the masses

So they could save their own asses.

Ellese Elliott

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

Picking out Strands: more on –emic/etic - By Martin Prior

Picking out Strands: more on –emic/etic

In earlier issues I have talked about the –emic/etic dichotomy, and scientific socialism.  This appeared in my ‘maroon socialism’ diagram, which I have annotated variously:

From Issue  20, on Purpose of Life... “There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it”	From Issue 22, on Language... “emic and etic – Language, Philosophy and Society”

Socialism is a relationship between society (inner) and the environment (outer).  There are several steps, firstly creating a semi-tamed environment, and then a ‘tamed environment’.  Note that the maroon is associated with culture, and pink with skills, technology and not least scientific socialism.  The –emic is associated with social conventions as to what equals what, and in technology we must be ready to challenge this.  Now picking out strands is an essential feature of scientific socialism, and very relevant to this is hypercorrection, introduced in the Issue 20 for situations where strands are insufficiently unravelled.  This is clearly understood by phonologists in language study – for example popping in H’s such as ‘helsewhere’ - but I also believe we can talk of ‘ethical hypercorrection’ in ethics.  And in picking out strands, the methodology does not differ significantly from market research, though this is notably a micro-analysis. 

Picking out strands is important for identifying relevant social factors: some people may see the institution of marriage as one of a number of social evils, as did Robert Owen in the earlier part of the 19^th Century.  But if one looks at the arguments, surely the problem is that wives had restricted property rights.  So is the issue one of marriage as a whole, or the emancipation of women as a whole?

The concept of ethical hypercorrection came to me in the ’Seventies when I felt there were flaws in some feminists arguments: I have discussed this in Issue 26 on Gender (‘Sexism: ) primarily in connection with gender rôles, picking out two strands, rôles within the household and those outside, and considered the combination of rôles, leaving aside questions of innate propensity to motherhood, or indeed any other aptitude; combination of rôles was sufficient to my point.  But ethical hypercorrection is a challenge for all progressive movements: people sense some flaw they can’t finger on, and are tempted to see progressive ideas as refuted.  Thus we should not be tempted to pursue some path such as ‘post-feminism’ and perhaps ‘post-modernism’.

In the diagram below I put forward the model in which the ethical hypercorrection appears.  The diagram comes from an article under preparation which has been shelved for some while (and indeed the first part related to dialectical materialism, which I didn’t really get to grips with):

-etic, -emic and hypercorrection

I shall outline this diagram by focussing on the two appearances of ‘association’: the first example appears between ‘concept’ and ‘realisation’.  We acquire a concept by associating it with its range of realisations and deciding they are the same sort of thing.  Thus in a language we learn a colour, which is realised in various shades.  The second example of an association relates something created with its perception: babies learn to associate what they hear with how it is articulated, and sound-waves transmit what is spoken to the hearer.

In each case association can take various forms, such as hearing, teaching and evolving.  Thus some forms of association are passive and others are active.  To my mind my mind culture relates to passive association and technology to active association.

Now an important tool for picking out strands, not least for scientific socialism, is the discipline of statistics, and below is a scheme for analysis:

 

level (in some instances known as ‘moments’)	description	Example
1st	averages, e.g. mean	social and economic aggregates and trends
2nd	variability, e.g. variance or ‘standard deviation’	random appearance of momentous individuals with varying effect
3rd	skewness	e.g. income effects
4th	{multi-normality}, kurtosis or ‘bulgingness’, ‘stragglingness’	hetero/homogeneity of communities, degree to which results are distorted by exceptions

Let us look at the interaction of trends and random effects, and here I would like to consider the rise of Hitler: Hitler led the Nazi movement in the ’Twenties and ’Thirties before finally coming to power.  But the thing that gave the movement the real momentum was the economic conditions after the Wall Street crash.  However by early 1933, the Nazis appeared to have passed their peak, and might well have declined further, but President Hindenburg felt that it would be helpful if Hitler were allowed to lead the German working classes rather than the socialists and communists, and appointed him Chancellor - with a cabinet with only one other Nazi – thinking in this way the left could be controlled.  So here we had the combination of a social trend with a random effect.

So we have something akin to which came first the chicken or the egg: perhaps, since the chicken lays more than egg, the social trend is the chicken, and the random effect the egg.

But now let us look at the requirements for identifying key elements, which I might call a ‘dialectic scheme’ – perhaps as a token gesture to the much misunderstood dialectical materialism:

(i)                 To identify at least three strands in a society, there must be at least three observations, likewise for any number.

(ii)               Over and above these strands there will be random effects, sometimes known as ‘catastrophes’, whose effects will be cumulative and which will require additional observations to those required to identify the various strands in society.

(iii)             In a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship.

(iv)             In any set of policies, there must be as many tools as there are objectives.

The idea of picking out strands has a mathematical parallel: if our ideas are expressed mathematically, strands correspond to variables and observations to simultaneous equations.

I italicised the above phrase ‘whose effects will be cumulative’, since one must beware of mixing preferred hypotheses with method, which seemed to me a fault in the approaches of both Marxists and anti-Marxists in my limited understanding of dialectical materialism.  But in fact for statisticians at least, it is a much stronger assumption – though often made – that random effects are not cumulative and in fact independent.  Furthermore cumulative random effects are likely to seriously obscure the underlying trends, social and indeed otherwise.

I have in fact extended this dialectic scheme, and let us turn to item (iv), the idea that in any set of policies, especially economic, there must be as many tools as there are objectives.  This point, which has a mathematical basis, came to me from New Zealand economist the Wolfgang Rosenberg, who was active in New Zealand opposing the neo-liberal policies of the Labour Finance minister Roger Douglas in the ‘Eighties.  In addition, to look at item (iii), I have already introduced the idea in my introduction that in a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship.  In formal logic we need axioms for one proposition, for two propositions and for three propositions, though we do not need any for four or more since a combination of the above will suffice.

By Martin Prior

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE - By Patrick Ainley

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE

Most people would say that it is impossible to live without hope. And yet this is just what most people are expected to do nowadays.

This is not just because of recession. There is a vague hope that recession will end and eventually there will be economic upturn – ‘something will turn up’, so meanwhile we can sit it out.

Perhaps it will turn up sooner if different policies are followed to ‘kick start’ the economy so ‘normal’ growth will resume. Except growth under capitalism is as normal as bust. It was only an illusion that deregulation and privatization in the 1980s to allow banks and big corporations to speculate freely would end this inevitable cycle.

In any case, endless growth to produce more and more commodities, while it may help some people to secure the necessities of life, does not make those who already have more than enough any happier or less insecure. Worse, growth is unsustainable; on the 23^rd August it was calculated that humanity began to take from the earth more than nature produced in 2012. For the rest of the year we live in debt to the planet and every year this day moves forward as we take even more from the earth than it can give back.

Again, as the hopes for our species’ survival diminish, we hope that something will turn up. ‘It’s happened before,’ we say, hoping for technical solutions so that humanity can invent its way out of impending climate and other catastrophe. But each of these temporary fixes have perverse consequences that threaten disaster in their turn; the worst of which would probably be the attempts at geo-engineering that are now being talked about as ways to slow global warming.

More far-sighted Utopians used to insist that social change was necessary instead of trying to patch things up technically so that we could go on as we were. This revolutionary transformation would happen more or less gradually and democratically but if necessarily violently to bring about a rational ordering of human affairs in the interest of the vast majority.

This old Utopianism has been trumped by the new Utopianism of free-market capitalism, to which all the mainstream political parties, dominant media and, of course, the global corporations and banks that profit from it are committed. If only the wealth-creating entrepreneurs are given the freedom to invest their capital to gain as much profit as possible for themselves and their shareholders, we will all benefit – so they all say. But this is the deregulated free-market capitalism whose boom ended in bust in the first place.

So, it is not surprising that many people place their hopes in dreams of wealth – winning a lottery, becoming a celebrity, or marrying one! Or they strive to live fully in the moment: ‘driven from distraction by distraction’, looking for the next high to become a legend. Hopes of such instant gratifications are easily manipulated by the advertisers of fashion. They are not so different from physically addictive behaviors and as easily controlled.

There are myriad other ways to adjust to an insupportable reality – from therapy to meditation, but religions offer the most desperate hopes of all. Their elaborate visions of other worlds that render lived experience illusory are tributes to the power of the human imagination, even if the reassuring feeling of being looked after by a benevolent deity derives from infant psychology, just as it is understandable that hopes of an afterlife comfort the dying and the bereaved.

Most people of course keep their heads down and don’t think about such things. We fill our lives with family and friends, following football or other sports and enjoying moments of relaxation from routine work. But even these modest hopes of a good life are removed from the younger generations by prospects of employment to sustain independent living that have become increasingly remote.

We are encouraged therefore to invest our hopes in education which has been substituted for employment and which is so tediously and interminably discussed instead of it. Conservatives typically advance the notion that education amounts to the preservation of culture – handing down unchanged the best that was ever thought and achieved. And of course, we have to learn from the past accumulated experience of humanity that constitutes culture but we have to learn critically to apply that knowledge to nurture new hopes of changing the self-destructive behavior of society in the present.

Instead, academic cramming on the one hand and vocational training for jobs that no longer exist on the other, only serves as an induction into the existing social divisions of knowledge and labour. These are changing with the relentless applications of new technology to deskill and outsource production, requiring a ‘flexible workforce’ to move from one mindless, short-term, low-paid and often part-time contract to another – if you’re lucky enough to find work.

Professional and managerial jobs are also being reduced in number and towards the conditions of waged labour, ending the hopes of a career entertained by so many overqualified but underemployed graduates. Hopes of escape through education leading to upward social mobility are dashed as the only mobility nowadays is down.

Philosophy – the love of knowledge – enables us ‘to confront with sober senses the real conditions of our existence’. So, as another Jewish philosopher wrote, ‘Do not laugh, do not cry but understand’. If the situation really is hopeless, we will then at least know how it happened that we threw away the heritage of humanity and we will still struggle to bring about the vast changes in our lives and in our societies that are needed so we ‘Do not’ – as a Welsh poet said – ‘go gently into that good night’ [but] ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

By Patrick Ainley with thanks in the last paragraph to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza and Dylan Thomas; T.S.Eliot in the middle – for we stand on the shoulders of giants, so let’s not crap on their heads!

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

Art - By Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: http://neonsuitcase.blogspot.co.uk/

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29

The meaning of life - By Patrick Ainley

The meaning of life

Life, in and of itself, can have no meaning unless it is given meaning. As ‘the movement of albuminous protoplasm’ – or whatever Engels called it in his materialist Dialects of Nature (today we would say the growth and reproduction of complex molecules) – life develops spontaneously from its inorganic background given the right conditions. But even this description is not definitive enough to distinguish the sparks of life that counter with their increasing complexity the entropy of the vast universe expanding to its dissolution. Since ‘All that lives must die/ Passing through nature to eternity,’ as Hamlet’s mother reminds him, it is sometimes difficult to know when something or someone lives or dies. Simple multiplying life forms are not so different from non-living crystals, for instance, or other self-replicating structures that are the ground of more complex and even conscious beings.

Nor is such description or definition of life the same as life’s meaning. Living systems also have purpose to maintain and reproduce themselves but this is not their meaning either, although it may be their meaning for them. As a famous biologist once said, ‘In the world of sea-urchins there are only sea-urchin things’ and observably sea-urchins, like all other organisms under natural conditions of selection, behave and evolve so as to survive and multiply. They do not mean to do so though; it just happens.

Meaning can only be given to nature by beings capable of making meaning. That is, beings with imagination using symbolic language to communicate their imagined and conscious reflections to one another, including importantly their self-consciousness of being conscious. The sort of signaling languages that other animals use to communicate with each other are too limited for this because they can only mean one thing at a time: a blackbird’s alarm call, for instance, means just one thing to other blackbirds and they react to its warning by sounding their own alarm as they fly off.

Human beings also use signals but we have to first agree amongst ourselves what they will mean. A red traffic light means stop, for instance, and there can be no ambiguity about this; although we could choose to change the signal if we decided to do so, as they did throughout China during the Cultural Revolution when red indicated go and green meant stop.

Human symbolic languages however are different from the unambiguous meaning encoded by the signals of other animals in that symbols, whatever form they take, can be and often are deliberately ambiguous. They can mean more than one thing which we have to agree on if we are to communicate effectively with one another. So, unlike Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through The Looking Glass, we can’t just choose what we want words to mean – at least if we want to be understood by other people.

In the case of ‘life’, scientists or medics can perhaps agree on working definitions, as above, to distinguish living from non-living things but this is not life’s meaning, which can only be its meaning for us as human beings agreeing this amongst ourselves for our common human purposes. Humpty Dumpty may get things upside down but he is not so silly; as he tells Alice, ‘The question is which is to be master – that’s all.’

So, unless we think that the meaning of life comes from somewhere else outside of or beyond the universe and its nature that we experience and the MoL is therefore to be discovered – in an old book, perhaps, or through some revelation which we would then have to interpret to make sense of the alien speaker’s symbolic language – we have to agree on as universal a meaning as possible to give it. This would be our master narrative, explanation and meaning that we would all agree upon.

Amazingly, despite all the twaddle about the sacredness and irrepressible vitality of human life, seven billion and more of us seem so far incapable of doing this. This is not just because there are different claims to ‘the truth’ advanced by various religions for example, or because some groups of people regard themselves as the masters who are entitled to impose their views on others at their expense, but because current global capitalist society is dedicated only to its own reproduction and expansion for profit regardless of the consequences for human and other life on this planet.

Of course, economic growth to manufacture more and more commodities for sale at a profit is presented by the few who gain directly and in the short-term from it, as enhancing life to ensure its best future. Many more buy into this illusory future because they cannot imagine any alternative to it and meaning is thus restricted to the terms of existing society.

But to more and more people, it is increasingly obvious, as climate and the seasons become increasingly erratic, while at the same time we reach and pass various natural limits to growth, that we cannot go on producing more and more stuff without physically destroying humanity and turning our environment into a wilderness. It would be a perversion of our situation as the only species and beings that we know of to have self-conscious awareness of our position as – in this sense – the highest form of life on earth, if we were to abrogate that responsibility.

We would then renege on the long eons of evolution of life on earth and the possibly unique physical conditions preceding them if we reverted to the level of unselfconscious life. Then we would have to ‘Think…’ with the recently deceased and sadly lamented Gore Vidal, ‘of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every 40 years.’ Then, ‘Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.’

To avoid this sui-species-cide we have therefore to inaugurate new shared meaning and value for human life to preserve its future survival on earth.

By Patrick Ainley

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29

Purpose of Life (ii) - By Johannon Davis

Purpose of Life (ii)

This piece is a continuation of the previous work 'Purpose of Life' and is a revision of its two tier approach. This two tier purpose concerned itself with survival and of continuing in ones existence and the acquisition of knowledge, however should we consider those individuals unable to communicate their experiences of sensory input and are thus unable to display knowledge i.e. the comprehension of information.

If one cannot know what it is like to be a bat, can one hope to be understand the guarded mind that lies without expression of itself? Put bluntly, as current science stands, no. This then poses the question that if such persons (and person is used intentionally) are unable to express knowledge in ways commonly observed through speech, action and reaction, then according to the previous proposal, are they then to be classed not as man but animal, achieving only their own survival through the involuntary continuation of organ function? Here we must note that whilst the acquisition of knowledge of such individuals cannot be proved, it must not be discounted and taken for non existence on grounds of current scientific limitation since it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the functioning of the mind of a man held captive by an uncooperative body should be just as well developed and knowledgeable as that of a man who believing his words without consequence should take to his bed and learn to cease all displays of consciousness.

Whilst a host of difficulties here arise as to the nature of the mind in relation to the brain which may or may not be capable of directing bodily expression, should we remain rigid in our requirements of some proof of knowledge acquisition as an essential component in the purpose of life which here is debatable, with knowledge remaining the great divide between man and beast, whilst our lived experience of the world about us does not allow such persons to be classed as less than man with purpose, what then shall we say? It seems this raises a significant flaw in the previously proposed two tier argument as it does not allow for the application of common sense. As such a third tier of purpose is here presented, that is, the ability for moral development in ones fellow man.

The act of being tended to by others allows for the development of virtues by both parties. There virtues not only promote a moral code in the community but allows the simultaneous migration of knowledge from passive to active through its application in meeting the requirements of the vulnerable person. As knowledge deepens through the lived experience of its application, the capacity for continued survival grows also as such knowledge when directed by the moral compass may drive forward the sciences and skills for extension and improvement of life.

This three fold approach to the purpose of life 1. To continue to survive 2. To acquire knowledge 3. To promote the virtues and moral compass of others - allows for the core of the self to be nurtured in its state of existence.

By Johannon Davis

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29

What do we mean by life? - By Lloyd Duddridge

What do we mean by life?

We have all often asked what the meaning of life is. We have all heard the stock answers: God truth love. However, does the question not begin with a question of definition?  What do we mean by life? The word is not often examined.
      Could it be as simple as existence? Is life the act of breathing? There is something in this idea that unsettles us. Life is more than existence. When we see someone terminally ill, we say that person has no life. Yet they are still alive. It appears that we see life as something bigger than existence. However this can be a dangerous move to make. For if life is more than existence, who gets to decide what a real life is? If we decided that someone is not really living is it permissible to exterminate that person? Is the basis of all totalitarian regimes, the idea that only a few people are actually living?  However the thought persists in us. Life is more than breathing.
       So just what is this life that is more than existence? It appears that if we argue that it is more than existence,then it must be more than physical. It seems that we view life as something we cannot measure or quantify, but can recognise when we see it. You will often hear people described as full of life. So life seems to have some spiritual component to it. Yet this spiritual understanding of life seems to be based around a conception of freedom. We seem to think those that are full of life are also full of freedom.
      Could this be the difference between existence and life? Existence is given to use. Some believe it is given by God,others by our parents. Either way it is given to us. We have no choice at all to exist. We either do or we don’t. In fact both ends of existence are in the main outside of our control. We do not choose when we are born or when we die, in the obvious exception of suicide.
      However it appears that we do choose to live. In fact life seeks to be conditioned around participation. It requires an active spirit. Does this mean then, that the passive are not really living? The answer may be to split the passive in two. Those that see being passive as superior lifestyle choice, and those that are simply lethargic. The first group is passive through action, the second is not.  The first group it could be argued still retain the spirit of life, and that the second do not.
    The second component of what we mean by life is also spiritual. That being memory. We believe that a person has had a life,if they are able to remember it. We are interested in a person’s history. Once they lose memory of who they are, we start to say things such as ‘what kind of life is this? ’ This is because we regard life as a process. Something that does not just happen but the requires experience and time. We believe that one that has many choices and has both won and lost,has lived a ‘real life’. This is also why the insult, ‘get a life’ has meaning. If life depended on existence alone the insult would have no meaning. What it means is that one needs to gain experiences. That the person they are aiming the insult has done nothing.
       It must thus follow that the core of what we mean by life lies in action. That when a person is no longer to act,they are no longer really living. It could be argued that breathing itself is an action, and that just surviving then also involves action. However as argued earlier, this is not the sort of action that we mean. We mean action as choice, action that has come from us. This is why we view life as something subjective. It is why we can see things like get out of my life. It can only be our life, and not a collective form of being, because we judge life to be our choices and our ideas. Thus I define life as the ability to at least want to act, and the ability to remember these actions or at least remember why we desired to act.  To live is to act.        

By Lloyd Duddridge

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29