the question has been asked, does experience give us meaning/purpose?
once when I was maybe, 14 or 15… I read a book, the title… ummm,
I have no idea… anyway, the book stated that human beings are
who they are because of climate, the resources in the ground,
the land, if it be mountains or flat or had lots of lakes…
physical details of this sort helped determined who people are…
and I thought that this was wrong… but I didn’t know HOW it was wrong
and so I decided to spend some time studying this problem…
this lead me to the path of my spending 40 years studying various
disciplines such as history, economics, politics and of course philosophy…
so did this one event, this one experience decide my life?.. in
a very real way, it did…this experience had given me some meaning/purpose
but, in another way it didn’t… it was the reason for my search, but it didn’t
create meaning/purpose… it depends on what you mean by meaning/purpose…
meaning/purpose suggests some reason for an event…
the meaning of getting married is… to legalize the love two
people have for one another… that can be said to be the meaning of
marriage…but it is not the only reason for marriage and this
is important to understand…people get married for a wide variety of
reasons… and each marriage has its own reasons for its existence…
so let us rethink this… existence seems to be a key word…
does experience give us a reason for existence? perhaps…
in other words, does experiences give us some reason for our
existence… I live for…and that might be love and that might
be for research and that might be for eating…
what do we live for? maybe, that might be a means of understand this
problem… what do we live for? what experience do we live for?
perhaps the experience itself gives us the reason for and the meaning of
our lives…and we can take from experience whatever lessons we need…
perhaps it is this lessons drawn from experience that gives us our
meaning/purpose? it is not the experience itself that gives us meaning/purpose,
but the lessons we learn from those experiences that gives us meaning/purpose…
and perhaps there is no meaning/purpose to our lives… and we just go
from experience to experience and then we die…
the simpler explanation is quite often the right explanation…
we just have experiences and we take what we can from them and
then we have another experience and another and another…
life is just a series of experiences from which we get lessons from
and then we die… so perhaps? we get our meaning/purpose from
those lessons we learn… but what if we don’t learn anything from
our experiences? I walked into a wall today because I wasn’t paying
attention…I was on autopilot and not paying attention…
the lesson I learned was to pay attention… not a very profound
or deep or meaningful lesson to be sure… but a lesson…
one you would have thought I would have learned already…
so we return… does experiences gives us meaning/purpose?
only if we think they do…what have we learned from
said experience? perhaps that is the key…
life seems to be a random series of experiences…
how we deal with these random series of experiences
tell us a great deal about who we are…
and perhaps that is the meaning/purpose of experiences?
they tell us who we are…or perhaps, perhaps
they tell us, experiences, what is possible for us human beings…
we learn from experiences and they tell us who we are and
what is possible? perhaps that is the meaning/purpose of experiences…
the problem lies with the fact, that people tend to learn different
things from experiences and quite often don’t learn anything from
any particular experience… I heard a description of a conservative
once… a conservative is a liberal who got mugged…
the lesson the conservative learned is different then the lesson a
liberal gets because of…fill in your own blanks…
we learn from experiences and that learning is because of
environment and training and education… we have an entire
history, a background that leads us to that experience…
we are taught by our family, the state, religion, the media
and we take that learning into our experiences…
we have an experience and we often decide the value of
that experience by our learning from the family, the state,
church, media… perhaps, it is a circular experience we have…
the experience we have is reinforced by the education we received
from our family, state, church, media…and the education we received
gives us our understanding of our experiences… the two, the education
we received and the experiences we have, are bound up in some
weird fashion… so to properly understand an experience, we
must somehow, suspend our education we have received from
the state, family, church, media… to form a “true”
opinion about our experiences, we must suspend our education
and make a judgment about that experience without “benefit”
of our education…but is that possible? can we just accept
an experience without any prior knowledge or education
about that experience… I don’t think so… so we are back
where we started from…
so, can we find meaning/purpose from our experiences?
Kropotkin