61–64 of 64 posts
To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter? The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering. The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist posit…
To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter? The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering. The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist posit…
I see meaning (and really consciousness itself) existing in a similar way that software exists in relationship to hardware. There is little meaning in the physical hardware itself, none really that we can experience directly as humans. Nevertheless, the running software contains a lot of meaning, even if it's fleeting and that information is stored in different places by different physical parts. I think this is akin…
To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter? The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering. The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist posit…
The Taoist position is more nuanced than to have "a lack of attachment". The lack of attachment is so you wouldn't feel compelled to force the existence of mental constructs like family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress. Imagine if the law prescribed the words you can say to your parents/brothers/sisters/friends/shopkeepers. You may be saying "Thank you so much" to the shopkeeper, but by being…
Their actionable practice is to teach the common man and governors some amount of detachment.
Their metaphysical position, the one the Dao mentions less, is one of a foundational non-being --
"The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth",
"What does 'the greatest misfortune is the self' mean? The reason I have great misfortune is that I have the self. If I have no self, what misfortune do I have?",
and particularly nihilist: "Heaven and Earth are impartial, they regard myriad things as straw dogs. The sages are impartial, they regard people as straw dogs." (Straw dogs meaning straw effigies of dogs burnt during holidays.)
I'm arguing that their metaphysical position (not their actionable practice) if followed to the end, with the addition of a modern knowledge of physics and biology and so on, ultimately leads one to a metaphysical nihilism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Taoist position is more nuanced than to have "a lack of attachment". The lack of attachment is so you wouldn't feel compelled to force the existence of mental constructs like family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress. Imagine if the law prescribed the words you can say to your parents/brothers/sisters/friends/shopkeepers. You may be saying "Thank you so much" to the shopkeeper, but by being…
You're confusing the Dao of heaven with the Dao of sages, to borrow from Dao Chapter 81. That is to say, you're confusing Daoism as a practicable and political philosophy (à la Chapter 19, Chapter 80) with Daoism as a metaphysical position (à la Chapter 1). Their actionable practice is to teach the common man and governors some amount of detachment. Their metaphysical position, the one the Dao mentions less, is one o…