Saturday, August 29, 2020

The Meaning Of Life / A Handful Of Gold

A cache of ancient golden coins was found buried in a clay jar in Israel. Photo by Yoli Shwartz, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

- Time was there was nothing better in life than to sit at a cafe and philosophize. Now look.
- What's that doing there? What is it exactly?
- A handful of gold. I found it this morning riding my bike across Wilshire. Right in the middle of the street. Must have been run over by trucks and cars a dozen times to get into the state it's in.
- Worth a thousand dollars, minimum.
- I guess.
- What are you going to do with it?
- Nothing. Look at it on this cafe table.
- Give it to me then.
- No.
- Why not?
- It will help me find the meaning of life.
- Find gold and you find also the meaning of life?
- Maybe.
- So what is it, the meaning of life?
- The question assumes life is a sort of message, a word with an unsure meaning it asks for. That's first.
- Life is really a message, or is message being used as a metaphor?
- Either, both. I don't know. Second, the question assumes the life you and me are living is a means to an end, and that end is its meaning.
- And the means we are living through is meaningless?
- Yes. If you are satisfied with life as it is now, the question won't have any meaning to you. Do you agree? What are you doing?
- I'm testing your claim, looking at the pile of gold on the table, looking at you, looking back at the gold.
- Cafe philosophy is an end in itself, the gold a means to an end.
- Yes.
- Then if I ask you what you think the meaning of life is, you answer?
- The second way of understanding doesn't apply to me, not here not now, this place I'm at is good enough, my friend sitting across from me.
- And gold on the table.
- And contemplating gold on the table.
- And in philosophy we consider whether metaphor entering our lives, substituting word for meaning, actually is responsible for raising the question of life's meaning.
- How does metaphor enter our lives?
- You'll laugh. George Lakoff, a U.C. Berkeley professor, honored and respected, calls himself a neuro-linguist. He argues - get this - that our primary mode of thinking is metaphor, and that metaphor is wired in the brain. That is why citizens who are wired by authoritarian parents to submit and admire submission can't communicate with nurturing citizens raised by nurturing parents.
- Politics is a battle of metaphors.
- According to this professor.
- The message spelled out in society has the meaning 'submit,' for one type of person, for the other, 'nurture'?
- Yes.
- Probably these ideas had meaning for the professor because they were means to the end of his wealth and fame. Did he become rich and famous?
- To some extent.
- Unlike you.
- See the gold on the table.
- Do you know what is so laughable about the professor's ideas?
- No, what?
- That politicians who become very rich and very famous for inflexibly holding onto ideas, for their framing metaphors which are supposed to be fixed, hard wired in the brain by education, once they get into office feel not a single qualm of conscience from immediately doing the exact opposite of what their politics has been messaging. Free market proponents demand tariffs and subsidies and form monopolies. Liberals lower taxes for the rich and cut social programs for the poor.
- This talk of brain wiring reminds me of Socrates trying to describe how no one knowingly chooses the worse, yet it looks like we do it all the time, submitting to the temptation of a pleasure we know will later cause us pain. We know the 'good' that draws us to indulging in the pleasure is an illusion, a mismeasurment, but can't help ourselves.
- We have two metaphors or frames of what makes life good: good is giving, or good is obedience. And we have two means to an end arguments: live for pleasure or live in control of pleasure. If both submit and nurture meanings of life are legitimate, actually indisputable since they are hard wired, how do we decide? Is it our fate to be both authoritarian and liberal stuck in one brain in a fight to the finish?
- Our politicians can effortlessly give up their hard-wired convictions because, as we've had occasion to say elsewhere, we have body and mind, and above both we have awareness. We choose our messages, our metaphors, our meanings and our ends.