Meaninglessness is the most neutral thing there is, the word has no negative or positive connotation. Meaning is a really fundamental thing, words only have meaning because we assign a meaning to them. These words that I am typing only have meaning because we have agreed as a society that they do. By defining words, we can explain the meaning of a new word by using other words that represent known ideas. By dissociating a word from its meaning, the word becomes meaningless. Say I invented a word right now- ‘bleh’ - and assigned a particular meaning to it but did not tell anybody what that meaning was. To me, the word ‘bleh’ has a real meaning, but to you the word is meaningless. This property of meaninglessness is uncomfortable and too ambiguous, and more than anything plainly unhelpful. Let’s think about meaning in the context of society, we give meaning to abstract things because it provides structure. Money is just a sheet of paper, language is just noise we make with our mouths, family members are just people we are surrounded by. These things do not implicitly have meaning, but as individuals with the quality of agency, we assign these things meaning.
Eventually we accept these abstract qualities as having meaning, as we must in order to communicate, trade, and survive. There is a concrete difference between accepting that there is created meaning in something versus implicit meaning, the latter is dangerous. Accepting that meaning is static, unchangeable, and objective, locks the individual into a perspective of life in which they are subject to self-deceit, willful ignorance, and unconscious acceptance of another’s thoughts. We live in a world in which meaning is attracted to abstract things, like words. Therefore, in order to communicate oneself properly to other individuals it is a necessity to assign meaning to abstract phenomena, like words or sounds. In order to be a helpful individual, we need the ability to accept meaning as assigned while simultaneously questioning it.
The mind of the individual should be at a proper balance between accepting both the meaning and the meaninglessness of life. From a proper balance, the individual has both the ability to communicate and reason - to question existing belief structures. The duel between meaninglessness and meaning exists in the assigning of moral beliefs, and is a backbone for the study of philosophy. When we bring morals into the situation, into the discussion, we become limited - good and evil are words that imply that things have implicit meaning. Death and killing are not implicitly evil, and life and birth are not implicitly good. In a 1984-esque society, the meaning of symbols can be skewed into messages of hate, giving the individual motivation to comply and obey through the government assigning meaning to specific symbols. For humans to break free, they need to be able to break a current thought cycle, they need to be able to understand the meaninglessness and the absurdity of the meaning currently assigned to objects and symbols.
Next post will be about how objectivity arises from abstract structures, through the agency of humans.