life is a series of experiences and sensations…
the question becomes, how does one derive meaning from experiences?
for example, one might say, that the meaning/purpose of a human being is
to worship god…
ok, let us work backwards… what experiences do we have that lead us to
the “believe” that our purpose/meaning is to worship god? …
the basis for our belief that our meaning/purpose of human beings comes
from revelation, the bible… we derive our understanding about
our meaning/purpose from authority…but we want to know what
experiences lead us to this belief that our meaning/purpose is to worship god?
there is no experience that I can think of that will lead me to
the conclusion that our meaning/purpose is to worship god…
we have faith and we have authority but no experiences…
so let us look at an experience…and do as Husserl suggested,
which is to bracket it…which is to say, make no judgments
about the experience…
I see a black and white object… it has a handle…
it is square… it has knobs on it…
I have described my experience with an object…
but what object and can I can any meaning/purpose from that object?
I offer up three possibilities for what I described…
One, a car…two, a stove… three, a refrigerator…
now most people would dismiss the fridge from the start?
but why? for most people, refrigerators are not square but rectangle…
experience gives most people an understanding of a refrigerators and
refrigerators are not square… thus experience gives us one means
to solve our little problem…
so we have left, a car and a stove…
I could say, I see a grill… does that help?
to answer my question, one needs context… did I see my object
outside, on the street or did I see my object in my kitchen?
and therein lies the problem with understanding experiences…
they need outside context to make any sense of them…
you just can’t explain an experience and have it make sense
without some context…
let us say, I will describe another experience…
I experience a round object which is attached to another round object
that reached to the ground and attaches to another round object…
the object is waist high and is flat on top…it is brown…
the roundness seems to be about three feet around…
it is the table I am writing on… but now, does that experience
help give any meaning to what I am doing or even to anything else in life?
no… it requires something else to give it context… what is that something else?
by the way, the above answer is… the stove…
so how do we get meaning/purpose from experiences?
Kropotkin