@Reconstructo,
Even if life is miserable, frustrating, challenging, or exhilerating it is never without meaning...If people are used to looking for meaning outside of themselves they are still looking for meaning in relation to their own.... What is life as a thing???No one can draw a line between the meaning and the being of people...Nature will do what people cannot do, and the stuff of being will only be so much matter, and meaning will reside in the memory of others...As people conceive of themselves, and always have as far as I can tell, it is as spirit, soul... No one can see a being in such things unless they are bound up with stuff that is as matter, meat and bones...We are meaning seeing meaning in all that affects our being as body and soul together, alive...I know people say life is meaningless....What they need to tell is the simple truth, that the process of life, and the cruelty we must suffer and participate in- is de-meaning, causing people to question their own meaning, the reason for all their actions...
Perhaps will is life, but very often personal will is the difference between life and death, and everything can seem so meaningless that one lives only to know again the meaning people should feel all the time...Consider that this is the mark of a failing society, that it does not feed the meaning everyone needs for health and life, but saps meaning to keep the failed form going post-mortem...People give up their lives with their essence, the meaning of their lives, to feed things utterly impersonal...
This is the problem with social forms... They are being without meaning, and when we fill these forms up with meaning we are supposed to get the stuff of life we find meaningful- back..A sacrifice for a god is not only a sacrifice, but an investment...It is not a coincidence that governments always demand what the gods once demanded...Neither is more effective than the other at securing the goods of life... There is a cosmic balance sheet being kept with out lives... Forget the people who directly sacrifice their lives for country for no return, and consider all those who take the promises of their countries in liu of payment for the lives and energy they feed into their countries, only to die short of all they were led to expect...
Societies kill people, yet, if we have now reached the point in this cannibalistic society that to have, we must take from others in distant lands, then their deaths can only be the augury of our own...The intelligence and technology our government brings to bear against near savages is death to them, and threat to us...We can see what happens to those who risist the government which we have long lost touch with...No sacrifice can be thought too great if it leaves one alive to consider the meaning of it....
Wealth is a form, and power too... We are led to believe that these are good, but are they???To have a few more wealthy people we have multitudes of poor...To have a form they little know and at a distance, many are made to question their own meaning, and to see they have too little meaning to justify the energy they put into life...Well; objecively, what does it matter if a few poor people are sacrificed for a desirable form???There is nothing objective about the value, which is the meaning of life...Objectively, everyone can drop dead; but their dropping dead deprives them of the subjective meaning they are entitled too...And all for wealth, a simple form having only relative meaning...
This is how societies die, one individual at a time, usually for forms all find objectively meaningful which mean nothing without the society, and their humanity to suppot that meaning... Societies very often suffer collective suicide because people cannot objectively question their forms...What will it take them to give them the means to examine their forms as objects compared to other like objects??? Can anyone force a paradigm shift???
Let me offer some insight into the phrase: Utterly impersonal...Schopenhaur talks of reality as object and subject, with ourselves standing midway between the two...Subject is form, the object considered... But forms also have an active side... We take the subject of some natural object, and use it to create a new objective reality... We might take the family as a subject, and form an objective social relationship out of our subjective understanding... Of such forms and reality, the last reaction we should have to an object view is as something impersonal... Just as with marriage, a community is a form we should see ourselves in...We all sacrifice something for our relationships, and the universal sacrifice is a part of ourselves, literally...
When we view our relationships as object forms, we should see a part of ourselves in it...They should not seem impersonal unless they have become all form, and no relationship....People sometimes hang onto their marriages as forms long after the relationship has died...Can they look at the form as personal when they invest none of their lives in them???. They may keep their form and give no meaning to it, and meaning is life...And how can anyone view a form as personal to which they are forced to give their lives for no return??? Such a relationship is not an investment in the future but is a harbinger of the past dragging the future to an early grave...In failed forms we are forced to endure our own demise...
