I haven't read Hoffman (started to a day or two ago but became bored with the text). Tell me if I need to read Hoffman to respond to your questions. It seems to me that we cannot -not- value some things, others, behaviors, and ideas over others, and that human values have always [but perhaps less so recently] included reference to and a sense of obligation toward the others among whom we live. Such other-directedness is already evident in primates in general and also in other species of life. And this valuing of others is not simply, in my view, an extension of nurturing behaviors toward the young and the drive to protect one's social group from outside aggression. Humans have felt and have needed to enhance, affirm, and expand their emotional integration with one another as a major aspect of what they are as individuals. Empathy is a major outgrowth of consciousness. It expands our concern beyond ourselves as individuals and underwrites all historical attempts to form mutually sustaining social environments and structures. It enables and drives the concept of social justice. So our purposes, at our best (and depending on the extremity of immediate factical circumstances such as starvation and imminent death), express our capacity for empathy as a major value.
Here was my original question(s):
Maybe we should all answer all these questions:
purpose?
value?
x
humanity in general?
merely for oneself?
(please use the back of the paper if more space is needed)
@Constance answer:
It seems to me that we cannot -not- value some things, others, behaviors, and ideas over others, and that human values have always [but perhaps less so recently] included reference to and a sense of obligation toward the others among whom we live. Such other-directedness is already evident in primates in general and also in other species of life. And this valuing of others is not simply, in my view, an extension of nurturing behaviors toward the young and the drive to protect one's social group from outside aggression. Humans have felt and have needed to enhance, affirm, and expand their emotional integration with one another as a major aspect of what they are as individuals. Empathy is a major outgrowth of consciousness. It expands our concern beyond ourselves as individuals and underwrites all historical attempts to form mutually sustaining social environments and structures. It enables and drives the concept of social justice. So our purposes, at our best (and depending on the extremity of immediate factical circumstances such as starvation and imminent death), express our capacity for empathy as a major value
My first thoughts are that I can't imagine meaning/purpose without reference to doing for others, without (reference to, as you put it) others. I can't imagine meaning without a purpose, nor purpose without meaning. In terms of a God, the existence of a creator or the existence of a being with cosmic level importance or power, wouldn't in and of itself, be enough for me to have meaning ... now perhaps being in the presence of this God would be ultimately satisfying ... but I can't imagine being human and being ultimately satisfied ... so that after a few days, you'd look around and go "ok, that's it? ... we need to start a movement to do something about this perfection, support groups, organize to bring the place down to earth, etc. So our temporality is part of this being human, being there.
I was relistening to Dreyfus' lectures on Moby Dick
Lecture 26 (introductory Moby Dick lecture - out of sequence because it's a make up lecture) on this page:
Philosophy 6 | Spring 2007 | UC Berkeley : Hubert Dreyfus : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
... and remembered how much I liked the idea of Polytheism - a god for each mood, Melville's conception of the ultimate and in-explicable in nature was of course the white whale and his conception of God was as a blind weaver ... but he valued moods (stimmung auf Deutcsch) and the "Merry May day gods of old" - the pantheon, all representations of the sacred in human life, none of them ultimate ... and railed against onto-theology ...
monotono-theology as Nietzsche put it.
As I said yesterday, I think the claim that 'God is dead' is absurd given the radical limits of our knowledge of the 'world' conceived as physical universe, cosmos, multiverse.
And I agree ...and also our failures of imagination as to what God could be.
Nietzsche's concern was also the impact of the idea of "God is dead" i.e. nihilism, which he forecast and which I think we have yet to see the end of. Nihilism as a result of wide spread belief in the death of God does not depend on whether or not there is a God ... that is the importnace of the line "and we killed him". Nietzsche saw that Christian evangelism perfected the logic (by way of the Greeks, via neo-Platonism) which successfully argued against the local religions it was replacing (again without regard for the truth of those religions) and finally turned on itself, the Christians, Nietzsche says, were to blame for the death of God.
(What Nietzsche did not foresee was the emergence of fundamentalism in the Abrahamic faiths (and recently even in Hinduism).
But yes, as to the facts of the matter in God's death ... people will believe we live in a simulation but have no use for the idea of a God ... this is interesting.
See also:
Eric Steinhart, "Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death" (Palgrave Macmillan)
For me, the idea of meaning and purpose too has to do with out temporality and our throwness - from which I think humor can come and a sense of the absurd. I think how close our everyday situation is to the soldier's experience of war.
"How did I get here?"
"Why are people dying all around me?"
"What can I do about this?"
"Wait ... there is a very funny side to all of this."
See also
Catch-22,
Slaughter House Funf and
Dr Strangelove.
which is a good read.