this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Sartre and the Meaning of Life (static.existentialcomics.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://existentialcomics.com/comic/591

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

What's the difference between the "meaning of an action" and the "purpose of an action"? ...I feel actions are interpreted through their purpose. I don't think "to invent a meaning" makes any sense when applied to "actions" unless you are including the possible purpose/motivation of the action as part of what you are inventing for it.

Unless what you mean by "meaning" is "consequence".. but in that case, you are not "inventing" it.. consequences do happen, they are factual.. at most you can interpret the consequence of the action, in the sense of viewing them through different moral perspectives, but even this would be heavily determined by "purpose", since all moral frameworks judge reality based on a purpose/goal/ideal.

I feel the popular concept of "the meaning of life" is equivalent to "the purpose of life".. and talking about "what should we do?" as the "only choice that matters" does implicitly set the weight on meaning/purpose, since that's what directs our choices.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Purpose is linked to Intention, meaning comes from reflection. So one is forwards looking and one is back.

My take, for what it's worth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That makes sense. However, that means they are just 2 aspects of the same thing, it's just the position from which you are looking at it which changes.

In that sense, any purpose that is unknown will require reflection, and thus will be a meaning, because we would need to look back to our own deeper motivations to understand ourselves.

I'd argue that purpose is like an onion.. behind each purpose there's a deeper purpose, and it often becomes more and more obfuscated, to the point that most purposes end up linking to deep subconscious wants, desires and instincts. I'd argue that most of our actions are done without being fully aware of the purpose we are following, or at least, not without a considerable level of "reflection" into ourselves. This further blurs the line between purpose and meaning.

In fact, I wonder if it's possible to act being fully aware of your decisions.. because if you were capable of knowing every inch of your mind, wouldn't that information about yourself have also an effect on your mind? like a snake biting its own tail, the more you learn about yourself, the more new information is added to your mind which potentially changes yourself.. making you into a new person, different from the one you thought you knew.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I totally agree!

I work with the mind for a living and your onion metaphor fits well with my perception and understanding.

Importantly, despite common discourse, the deeper layers are no more or less real than the upper layers.

They're all real, all true, all just built on top of each other.

Seperate to that point, I think there's some real value in differentiating meaning and purpose, as they're not polar twins, they can exist as distinctions.

Meaning of something can be different to its purpose, we discover after its done. This is why Failure has such value in life.

We can also make meaning of things with no purpose, why playing is worthwhile.

And we can have purpose without meaning, where we know we're engaging in boring meaningless activity because it's necessary and functional.

Where these two discussions overlap, is that something can have meaning or purpose to one layer of the onion but not for a different layer.

I believe that we can use that as a reflective activity. If we assume all actions have purpose, we can ask which layer of the onion is driving that purpose. If we assume all activity has meaning we can ask which layer of the onion is making meaning.

Thanks for getting my brain pondering this today!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Meaning of something can be different to its purpose, we discover after its done. This is why Failure has such value in life.

Hmm... but "Failure" is a consequence, not a cause. So I feel here by meaning you are including the evaluation of the consequences of the action, not just the cause/purpose/intention of it.

I feel "meaning" is a word with too many meanings (lol). When applied to an ongoing "action", it might refer to the cause/purpose motivating the action.. but when applied to something that has happened in the past it's sometimes used to evaluate the consequences of the action and try to retroactively judge the performance of that action based on whether or not it met an overarching "good/optimal" cause (purpose).

When people say "the meaning of life" generally they don't mean the consequences of life, or how should life be evaluated under a moral framework to determine whether there was a "failure" we should correct, I feel. At least that's not what I get from the expression.

we can have purpose without meaning, where we know we’re engaging in boring meaningless activity because it’s necessary and functional.

Good catch! ..though it feels again like another meaning of meaning :P

By "meaningless activity" I feel we typically imply "trivial"/"not-impactful"/"irrelevant". And even this definition continues tied to purpose, since to determine whether something is important / impactful /relevant we need a main topic that it measures against (a purpose). Even the most "meaningless" of activities will carry meaning if you see it under the right frame of reference. So this looks to me like 2 different purposes competing for relevance, the activity is only meaningless because its purpose is not as relevant for the main goal in our mind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh I could talk about this all day, picking about the language Wanna meet down the pub?

Then I say failure, what I'm thinking about is where the outcome doesn't match the intention which aligned with the purpose. Even in that scenario, we can make meaning form it.

Illustrative Example..

I meet Katie. I date Katie and I marry Katie with the intention of staying together forever for the purpose of raising a family and having a partner.

Katie and I later divorce and I have to wonder why. On reflection I find meaning in the experience despite regarding it as a "mistake", in hindsight, to get married. It has meaning in what I learned and took from the experience.

Failure of a similar style but scale also applies here. If I intend to get up early and be productive, I "fail" and make the meaning that I'm over worked and stressed and need some R&R.

That's what I'm picturing when I talk about them as different perspectives, seperate but related.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Hahaha, I do enjoy the conversation :P

Ah, I see.. then meaning/purpose it's not 2 aspects of the same thing, but rather... one is the thing, the other one is the performance/efficiency of the thing.

But.. would you say that the use of the word "meaning" in "the meaning of life" is meant to imply "the performance of life at fulfilling its purpose"?

I feel that then talking about meaning without purpose makes no sense, because you can't evaluate the performance of something without having a goal to evaluate it against.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I agree, "The meaning of life" is more "The purpose of life" in the way I'm using the words, that's fair.

Can we have meaning without purpose, intention or aims? What about making meaning out of things that are essentially random?

Humans are good at that. Faces in the Cloud. God stopped the bullet. I got cancer for a reason.

I kinda wish people wouldn't find meaning in things without purpose sometimes. Maybe they feel as you do, that by giving meaning to these things then they don't lack a purpose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Can we have meaning without purpose, intention or aims? What about making meaning out of things that are essentially random?

Doesn't this contradict your previous definition of "meaning"? If there isn't intention/purpose then how do you reflect on whether the "outcome matches the intention"? didn't you say that this reflection is what defines meaning?

Maybe I'm missing something? or perhaps you are using a different meaning of "meaning" here?

What I feel we humans do too much is give too much importance to ourselves... we tend to see faces in the cloud because we are constantly measuring reality to our own little pocket of experience.. we tend to think the bullet stopped because of something we're meant to do... we tend to think we got cancer because of something we did...

We keep thinking nature governs itself with the same rules and motivations that we experience in our little minds.

Note that "life" is not the same thing as "nature". The purpose/goal of life might not be the same thing as the "goal" the Universe moves towards.. most of the Universe is dead, non-life. For all we know, the Universe might actually have ultimate death as its destination, and we are actually "the baddies", we might be the ones who fight against the ultimate "purpose" of the Universe, the ultimate maximization of entropy and the peaceful state of equilibrium where things stop exchanging electrons and we reach a cold thermal death.

I don't think the Universe "cares" about whether we see faces in the clouds, or what we think about the bullet/cancer hitting/missing us. Life might have the purpose to preserve itself.. but that's because life is shaped by evolution to be that way (and we had to!). We had to use those same thermodynamics the Universe moves towards in order to perpetuate ourselves, sometimes thermodynamics are on our side, but not because the Universe willed it so, but because we adapted ourselves so that it is so (we would not have survived otherwise). I feel there's a lot of "survivor bias" in most of the existential questions humanity makes itself. We ask ourselves "Why are we here?" while forgetting about the astronomical amounts of trial-and-error that happened to reach this point... it's like someone wondering "why did I pick the right door?" after having chosen every single other door before that one and failed.

Let me end in a happier note:

I feel most problems become meaningless when we sit back and see things from a broader perspective. We often put too much value in things we believe are valuable, when in reality, they only are valuable because we ourselves place that value on them.

Being able to sit, relax, and just enjoy your time (without being stressed about the things you are NOT achieving) is not a bad way to pass your life. In the grand scale of things, we are insignificant, don't worry too much about things you can't change, it's not worth it.

And for the things you can change to improve life... why worry about it? just do them! There's literally no logical reason to be stressed about things. Just go and do what you can do and don't worry about the things that you can't do.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mark me down for either/or.