Meaning Of Life
Meaning Of Life
Saturday, 26 January 2008
All knowledge comes via the apparatus we have - i.e the senses. How can there be any other way without recourse to metaphysics? It seems impossible to conceive of an alternative. This means that what might exist outside of possible experience, if anything at all, is unknowable.
Kant didn't say there was nothing outside of experience he just said that whatever it was could not be known. But he couldn't help speculate what it might be like, at which point he left himself open to criticism from other philosophers, Hegel and Schopenhauer chiefly among them.
Wittgenstein avoided this problem by concluding that whatever lies outside of experience cannot be spoken of. It was better to be silent on such matters. We should not concern ourselves with the transcendent which is by definition unknowable. This includes everything about God, everything metaphysical and everything absolute.
Even if the speculations of metaphysics were true there is no way to confirm them as confirmation would require standing apart from the world. Better to concentrate on the detail of what can be known - i.e. everything that is “sensible”.
I have said that what is sensible is better understood as feeling. All the senses are actually felt. So our primary goal, the so called meaning of life, is to understand what we feel. That everything in experience be understood as a feeling would give rise to the most accurate conclusions possible. It would also be the most useful way in which the knowledge that can be had be used to optimise the human experience.
This is simplistic but in essence most philosophies are simple. What I am doing is taking the broad brush of western epistemological thought and finding a conclusion in a form of psychology. It is what Hume and his contemporaries were doing over two-hundred years ago. It is still a philosophy unresolved.
