"Existential purpose?"

I was wondering if existentialists have a term for the purpose a person gives their life to give it meaning. I would think they would have a common name for this?

 

weed...

 

Richard Dawkins invented the nonsense word "meme", convincing millions to babble nonsense for decades, proving that Oxford university is full of crap, then going on to prove they are also spineless, by not attempting to tell them they were spouting gibberish. Its so much cheaper and easier to just make up new definitions and words, than to use a dictionary, and this is true for all of academia, which has consistently failed to teach children how to use a dictionary, share their words, and play nice. When life is meaningless and a person gives their own lives meaning, its called desperation.

 

the meaning of meaning is optional.

it is not the unproductive who are worthless, but the inconsiderate.

the only thing life needs is to be enjoyed, without robbing others of the enjoyment of theirs.

 

Life may be suffering as a Buddhist would say, but it is also a temporal cosmological miracle, so appreciate while it lasts, because entropy always wins in the end.

 

That's a fancy way of saying, "Shit happens, and crap rolls downhill, but only because life is a series of miracles we survive for any length of time."

 

I'm saying maybe not focus on the negative all the time and enjoy your fleeting condition in this ephemeral realm.

 

A joint does the trick for me.

 

Which is Existentialism in a nutshell, and perhaps the most realistic way to state it -- no sugar coating, no walking on water, no eternal damnation, just the plain, unvarnished truth.

 

Existentialism is bullshit, related to your immune system. It abuses classic logic to insist that, if the universe is paradoxical, then life is meaningless, because academics have severely stunted senses of humor. My own work points out that the simple and easy way to test the issue, is to find someone with a sense of humor, and prove that humor is the only thing that can make logic and metaphysics more meaningful. Humor is not meaningless, or the government would not be classifying jokes older than monuments, and existentialism exists merely because humor is often taboo in modern civilization.

 

we live in a universe that wasn't made for us, but which we are able to live in its odd forgotten spaces, as long as we don't destroy them.
we don't know what else there is or isn't, beyond what we can learn by applying the methodology of science,
except to know, that not knowing doesn't prevent anything either. i'm not sure i'd call it myricals that we survive, but it is without anything owing us anything.
no myracle is going to prevent us from destroying ourselves if we don't stop making rediculous things more important then to avoid doing so.

 

We live in a universe that is self-organizing, our bodies are self-organizing, and modern science is poised to prove that time itself is self-organizing, and logic has no demonstrable meaning without a sense of humor. The idea that our universe wasn't made for us, contradicts all the physical evidence. The earth has an enormous amount of radioactive material that no other planet has in the solar system, it has an enormous moon, bigger than any other, is in exactly the correct orbit, wobbles on its axis just right, and has exactly the right composition of elements to support the abundance of nature and the evolution of intelligent life.

The Big Bang was "just right" for humanity to evolve, and anyone who tells you otherwise, is contradicting all the evidence. You could say we evolved because 42 is as good as it gets, but that's the same thing as claiming life is magic or a divine creation.

 

There is no easy answer to this. You could try to apply Heidegger's 'historicity' in that a person's life has a temporal historical context. Or Sartre's facticity, which is the facts that make up a person's life and being, everything from his body shape to his interests. An individual, according to Sartre, was always in the process of 'becoming' and this facticity was the manifestation of this 'becoming.' But we are always free to reinterpret this facticity and therefore Sartre argued that we can never really be anything in particular---in other words we can never label ourselves---such as a profession (e.g. pilot, waiter, cook, etc.) or a character type (i.e. shy, fearless, clumsy, etc.), and that to do so was in, what he called, 'bad faith.' There was a tension between freedom; a struggle between wanting to be someone or something, and yet wanting to be free of that someone or something. Therefore he would say that there was a despair in having a purpose or wanting a purpose, and yet facing the freedom we have.

But these terms, historicity and facticity, were not used by either one in the same way other philosophers used them (reflecting Wooleeheron's comments on creating new definitions).

If this purpose and the meaning it gives are sincere and true, then we could use the term authenticity. This is a key problem all through existentialism beginning with the grandfather of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. If we are authentic, we take responsibility for ourselves and are true to ourselves. Kierkegaard argued that people are afraid of, and avoid this, and therefore turn the control of their lives over to others. Therefore, if your purpose is to be a cog in the machine, or a follower than you are denying your authenticity. Nietzche's Will to Power as well, at an individual level, was about seeking to be authentic. To become authentic was one of the biggest goals of existentialism and to the existentialists, most people were not authentic.

 

I agree, it is terrible that people abuse the language like this. Words have meanings and that is how we communicate. So why make it difficult by changing the meanings of words and then creating some kind of elitist use of that word that makes others think of something else?

But it is hard to talk about this concept without explaining what it is about. The problem is there is no word that refers to this. But not to worry, I have created a new word that will refer to this very thing as a noun, verb, adjective, however you want to use it to stimulate conversation around this problem: Clitoris.

It is a great word, and has a certain feel about it that I'm sure you will agree. Because I define it as a noun and a verb and so forth, we can use it in all kinds of ways, for example, I was talking to a bunch of women and wanted to impress them so I clitorised each of them. In fact, just like people use the same word with their own meanings, the very way in which we pronounce this word depends on the person. Some people will stress the first syllable, making it a smaller word, while others will stress the second syllable, making it a bigger word, that rhymes with Deloris. (I used to know a Deloris, a cute Filipina that was married to an American. I once remarked to my wife that Seinfeld made a joke about Deloris rhyming with Clitoris and she proceeded to tell Deloris, who then gave me a mischevious and almost longing secretive smile, which suggested to me that her husband did not clitoricize anything. I suspect that he spends his days on his couch drinking beer rather than writing philosophy...)

But is it wrong to clitoris? I know it can rub the wrong way. But if manipulated properly a clitoris can stimulate all kinds of conversation and new concepts and experiences. On the other hand, a clitoris can certainly be a source of scandal. But how are we to know whether someone is using a literal or a clitoral definition of a word. And what if they are frustrated and subconsciously referring to something else--they may not even realize it. The thing is, once the clitoris is out there, it grows. It seems to be a natural process. And certainly, if the clitoris brings enjoyment, or a new realization, then in some cases everyone will use it.

 

The wealthy have been promoting the mindless mob arguing over the definition of stupid, as an easy way to maintain control. Formal logic encourages people to organize along the same lines as a flock of chickens, while the wealthy promote scum and bullies floating to the top, and at least a third of the population supports them. By merely discouraging anyone from laughing at them, they promote the abuse of language and the legal system. Galileo was imprisoned not because he contradicted doctrine, but because everyone actually paying attention to their use of language and the objective evidence is a threat to the entrenched wealth and power.

 

I was hoping you would enjoy that.

 

For me, language is mathematics, and I can easily dissect and describe in detail the analog logic behind anything anyone writes. Words are geometry for me, as much as anything else, and I can describe the logic, humor, and geometry behind anything you write in elaborate detail. Seriously, I don't even have to read half of what some people write, because I know what it says by merely looking at the shapes of the paragraphs. Even the world around me is just more mathematics for me, and you could say I'm a sort of biological computer. I've had to rewrite the laws of thought entirely, and I'm not done yet.

I've already exhausted all the academic approaches, which are counterproductive, and can easily trash out any traditional arguments using nothing more than the self-evident truth and their own standards. Its weird, like being a century ahead of anyone on the planet, but the computers will spit it all out soon enough, and my book explains everything in detail, and is aimed at people who already know a great deal about what it describes. Time is the future of humanity, and how it is possible to even change the past.

 

You're out there, lol.

 

Never worry, never fear, modern science will save us from modern science, and any existentialist angst, just as soon as they receive approval from Wall Street to share their words and play nice. The Pentagon still insist they make weapons, and not talk about what they do.

 

My wife hopes that Aliens possess much larger penises.