Meaning: The Great Truth about Human Nature

[coberst]

Meaning: The Great Truth about Human Nature

 

The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank

 

In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life?

 

The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man?

 

“Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy.

 

Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”

 

After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination.

 

The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.

 

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

 

Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??

 

Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker

[gcol]

[/Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”?? QUOTE]

 

Yes, If you agree that the struggle is between selfishness and altruism. Because we think we know the way we ought to behave, but always want to behave in an opposite way. an unanswerable conundrum, unless you resort to religion, which is an easy way out.

 

I am unfamiliar with your sources, but have I, in laymans terms caught the drift?

[coberst]

[/Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are' date= in the last resort, problems of the soul”?? QUOTE]

 

Yes, If you agree that the struggle is between selfishness and altruism. Because we think we know the way we ought to behave, but always want to behave in an opposite way. an unanswerable conundrum, unless you resort to religion, which is an easy way out.

 

I am unfamiliar with your sources, but have I, in laymans terms caught the drift?

 

 

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

 

Humans are animals plus something else. “Soul” is a word created by many to express that something else. That something else, that soul, represents our problem because wo/man has lost, to a large extent, its animal instincts as a guide to behavior. Our ego has controlled behavior for humans, by controlling anxiety, by taking in anxiety and letting it out a bit at a time. The ego makes it possible for the creature to stop and weigh the situation before acting.

 

Wo/man creates meaning to give life a value. With consciousness and recognition of mortality wo/man has attempted to give meaning to the things we do in order to avoid the recognition that life is not much. In other words we recognize our self as more than animal, but without the presence of meaning in our life we are faced with recognition that we are just matter that is here for only a little while. We are creators of meaning so that we are more valuable than just mortal beings.

 

Examine the great efforts we put into religion. Is this not an prime example of the creation of meaning and is this not associated with the concept of soul.