Submitted by Maxwellsdemon17 t3_y75g2l in philosophy
"Stories, narratives, and myths give meaning to our reality."
No they don't. People endlessly repeat this vague claim without examining it. If anything "gives" reality meaning, that presumes meaning doesn't necessarily belong to reality. Sure, reality can create meaning, because stories are part of reality, but the meaning itself would not necessarily be a part of events themselves.
From this perspective, people attribute meaning to events post hoc—and it is implied that events do not have meaning in and of themselves. Meaning, from this perspective, only occurs in the mind. This comes to the fore later, when the writer states,
"As the world is in itself indifferent to human meaning, we need stories that connect contingent events to make sense of the reality we live in."
(side note, I more than mildly dislike when one persons speaks for all humanity in the first person plural)
Before I even get to why such claims stand on shaky ground at best, I want to address the people who will get totally hung up on how right they are about meaning only occurring in the mind. Stories and myths and narratives are not necessary for meaning even if you are one of those people who believe meaning only occurs in the mind.
Meaning, in the sense meant by people who take this stance, can still come from memory. It doesn't need a story. It doesn't need a narrative. It doesn't need a myth. Meaning, the most deeply felt intimate meaning, the meaning that a person lives, that they feel, which drives their actions, comes from memory, memory which doesn't need to be articulated, structured, made sense of or interpreted.
The mind and body know and "understand" pain, desire, etc., etc., without words. In fact, the ability to "understand" sensations without language makes language possible. Distress and pleasure don't need a representational medium to be important or meaningful. If anything, the relation would be the exact opposite.
I don't even believe this to be the case. I am only providing it for the people who are so entrenched in the hubris of materialist reductionism that they can only consider meaning as occurring in the mind (reserving the stance of ultimate truth teller for themselves while "discrediting" humanity as a whole).
It is obvious to me that meaning exists independently of the mind, and the mind gets closer or further from articulating that meaning through the life course. I won't argue this case. I will, however, point out how Blumenberg and the author use this sense of meaning when it suits them.
"The possibilities of constructing meaningful narratives from collective histories are indeed not infinite. At a certain point, stories and myths start misrepresenting or even abusing history. It is, therefore, important to determine when exactly myth becomes illusion."
He goes on to elaborate how myths become illusions when they lie, but if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies. An underlying truthful meaning must exist, in reality itself, for there to be a distinction between illusory and true myths.
Do you not know that the truth, the simple materialist reductionist truth, the phenomenological truth, whatever takes your fancy, can be told in such a way as to give a false (illusory) meaning? After all, truth is never complete. People are not that smart. The very idea that I could even imagine such a truth is ridiculous. I can't even accurately imagine, in totality, what happens in a single city on any given night. Perhaps someone else has a brain that is that much more powerful than mine, but I haven't seen it.
Anyway, this is making my brain hurt. I've already done my eight hours of work today.
Your commentary is well written but you make certain leaps that I'd like to question, if you don't mind. Feel free to ignore me.
What is objective meaning in your view? Can you present an example of meaning without narrative? Memory is narrative, so that doesn't work. To demonstrate this, I simply ask you to give an example of something you remember that isn't drawn from narrative. Even non-personal facts like 1+1=2 are remembered principles extracted from narrative memories of examples where this was true.
I also must ask you to examine when you say, 'if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies.' You mentioned pain. Pain does not exist outside the mind, or at least we have no evidence that it could. Is pain a lie? Is desire?
And again with 'the truth... can be told in such a way as to give a false meaning,' if only 'truth' is transmitted, where does the falsehood in that 'false meaning' come from? It would seem the falsehood is the one that conflates the map and the landscape.
Just thoughts...
Memory only seems like narrative because that's the primary tool you're using describe it. Unlike narrative, however, memory doesn't necessarily exhibit a beginning, middle and end.
Memory exists in the hippocampus and dispersed across the pfc. It's a network, not a line. There is no beginning, middle or end in a network, just nodes with more less amounts of connection between them.
For a good example of memory that doesn't present as narrative, consider traumatic memory. Traumatic memory persists (by persists I mean the defining symptom is flashbacks) because it cannot be incorporated into the existing explanatory framework (the story of why things are the way they are) of an individual.
Now, the fact that traumatic memory presents as surface reality, as meaningless, would seem to reinforce the idea that memory requires narrative to have meaning, but traumatic memory is not the only type of memory that refuses to be incorporated into narrative.
People can also experience memories that don't present as narrative, but these memories involve an intense multiplication of meaning (as opposed to the other extreme, the closure of meaning). People sometimes refer to such experience as awe, sublime or transcendental.
In either case, the memories belong to the realm of the unspeakable. Their meaning cannot be articulated (brought into narrative), either because the meaning is too terrible to be absorbed by the psyche, or too great. In both cases, the zero day quality of the memories tends to become like a genius loci of a great many words (because they are never enough).
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As for the idea that "if they are giving a meaning that does not actually exist except in the mind they are all giving lies," my point is that the conditions they give are false, not that the meaning they have given is false. That is, the totality of phenomena involved in the production of meaning are not restricted to the mind.
(so, to look again at pain, pain indicates something about reality; its existence in the mind in no way invalidates its truth—we do not need to attribute "puncture" to a needle popping through the skin in order for the sensation to mean "puncture")
Meaning is not merely imposed on reality like a map over the territory. It is (should be?) the exact opposite. The territory demands that the map accommodates its nature, or the map becomes nonsense. The author of the essay and the German guy he wrote about both recognize this, but they do so while earlier insisting that the map gives the territory meaning. Surely, the territory gives the map meaning.
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As for objective meaning, I don't deal with the objective and subjective dichotomy in the normal way (i.e. the way it was hammered into me in college). A subject is just a subcategory of object, namely an object with a model of itself for itself. Subjective meaning is objective meaning; it's just an incomplete part (subcategory) of it.
The incompleteness of subjectivity precludes absolute truth (this is where the falseness comes into truth, the incompleteness of truth). Objective truth, essential truth, to the subject, only arrives in bits, or it overwhelms. I see through a mirror darkly.
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