NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
ter>Sam Vaknin's Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web Sites Every type of human activity has a malignant equivalent. The pursuit of happiness, the accumulation of wealth, the exercise of power, the love of one's self are all tools in the struggle to survive and, as such, are commendable. They do, however, have malignant counterparts: pursuing pleasures (hedonism), greed and avarice as manifested in criminal activities, murderous authoritarian regimes and narcissism. What sets the malignant versions apart from the benign ones? Phenomenologically, they are difficult to tell apart. In which way is a criminal distinct from a business tycoon?
Many will say that there is no distinction indeed. Still society treats the two differently and has set up separate social institution to accommodate these two human types and their activities. Is it merely a matter of ethical or philosophical judgement? I think not. The difference seems to lie in the context. Granted, the criminal and the businessman both have the same motivation (at times, obsession): to make money.
Sometimes they both employ the same techniques and adopt the same venues of action. But in which social, moral, philosophical, ethical, historical and biographical contexts do they operate? A closer examination of their exploits will expose the unbridgeable gap between them. The criminal acts only in the pursuit of money. He has no other considerations, thoughts, motives and emotions, no temporal horizon, no ulterior or external aims, no incorporation of other humans or social institutions in his deliberations. The reverse is true for the businessman.
The latter is aware of the fact that he is part of a larger fabric, that he has to obey the law, that some things are not permissible, that sometimes he has to lose sight of moneymaking for the sake of higher values, institutions, or the future. In short: the criminal is a solipsist - the businessman, an integrated person. The criminal one track minded - the businessman is aware of the existence of others and of their needs and demands. The criminal has no context - the businessman does. Whenever a human activity, a human institution, or a human thought is refined, purified, reduced to its bare minimum - malignancy ensues. Leukaemia is characterized by the concentration of the bone marrow upon the production of only one category of blood cells (the white ones) while abandoning the production of others.
Malignancy is reductionist: do one thing, do it best, do it more and most, compulsively pursue one course of action, one idea, never mind the costs. Actually, no costs can exist - because the very existence of a context is ignored. Costs are brought on by conflict and conflict entails the existence of at least two parties. The criminal, for instance, pays none because he does not include in his welt bild the Other. The dictator doesn't suffer because suffering is brought on by recognizing the other. The malignant forms are sui generis, they are dang am sich, they are categorical, they do not depend on the outside for their existence.
Put differently: the malignant forms are functional but meaningless. Let us use an illustration to understand this dichotomy: In France there is a man who made it his life's mission to spit the furthest a human has ever spat. This way he will make it into the Guinness Book of Records (GBR). After decades of training, he succeeded to spit to the longest distance a man has ever spat and was included in the GBR under miscellany.
The following can be said about this man with a high degree of certainty: a. The Frenchman had a purposeful life in the sense that his life had a well-delineated, narrowly focused, and achievable target, which permeated his entire life and defined them. b. He was a successful man in that he fulfilled his main ambition in life to the fullest. We can rephrase this sentence by saying that he functioned well. c.
He probably was a happy, content and satisfied man as far as his main theme in life is concerned. d. He achieved significant outside recognition and affirmation of his achievements. e. This recognition and affirmation is not limited in time and place. In other words, he became "part of history." But how many of us would say that he led a meaningful life?
How many would be willing to attribute meaning to his spitting efforts? Not many. His life would look to most of us ridiculous and bereft of meaning. This judgement is facilitated by comparing his actual history with his potential or possible history. In other words, we derive the sense of meaninglessness partly from comparing his spitting career with what he could have done and achieved had he invested the same time and efforts differently. He could have raised children, for instance.
This is widely considered a more meaningful activity. But why? What makes child rearing more meaningful than distance spitting? Nothing does but common agreement. No philosopher, scientist, or publicist can rigorously defend an argument in defence of a hierarchy of meaningfulness of human actions. There are two reasons for this inability: a.
There is no connection between function (functioning, functionality) and meaning (meaninglessness, meaningfulness). b. There are different interpretations of the word "Meaning" and, yet, people use them interchangeably, obscuring the dialogue. People often confuse Meaning and Function. When asked what is the meaning of their life they answer, using function-laden phrases. They say: "This activity lends taste ( = one interpretation of meaning) to my life", or: "My role in this world is this and, once finished, I will be able to rest in pace, to die." They attach different magnitudes of meaningfulness to various human activities.
Two things are evident: a. That people use the word "Meaning" not in its philosophically rigorous form. What they mean is really the satisfaction, even the happiness that comes with successful functioning. They want to live on when flooded by these emotions. They confuse this motivation to live on with the meaning of life.
Put differently, they confuse the "why" with the "what for." The philosophical assumption that life has a meaning is a teleological one. Life - regarded linearly as a "progress bar" - proceeds towards something, a final horizon, an aim. But people relate only to what "makes them tick", the pleasure that they derive from being more or less successful in what they set out to do. b.
Either the philosophers are wrong in that they do not distinguish among human activities (from the point of view of their meaningfulness) or people are wrong in that they do. This apparent conflict can be resolved by observing that people use an interpretation of the word "Meaning" different to the one adopted by the philosophers. To reconcile these antithetical interpretations, it is best to consider three examples: Assuming there were a religious man who established a new church of which only he was a member. Would we have said that his life and actions are meaningful? Probably not. This seems to imply that quantity somehow bestows meaning.
In other words, that meaning is an epiphenomenon. Another right conclusion would be that meaning depends on the context. In the absence of worshippers, even the best run, well-organized and worthy church might look meaningless. The worshippers - who are part of the church - also provide the context. This is unfamiliar territory. We are used to associate context with externality.
We do not think that our organs provide us with context (unless we are afflicted by certain mental disturbances), for instance. The apparent contradiction is easily resolved: to provide context, the context provider must be either external to the context consumer - or with the inherent, independent capacity to be so. The churchgoers do constitute the church - but they are not defined by it, they are external to it and they are not dependent on it. This outside look - whether in the form of the provision of context, or in the form of epiphenomenalism - is all-important. The meaning of a system cannot exist without it, indeed it is its derivative. A second example only supports this approach: Imagine a national hero without a nation, an actor without an audience and an author without (present or future) readers.
Does their work have any meaning? Not really. The outside look again proves all-important. There is an added caveat, an added dimension here: time.
To deny a work of art any meaning, we must know with total assurance that it will never be seen by anyone. Since this is an impossibility (unless it is to be destroyed) - a work of art has undeniable, intrinsic meaning, a result of the mere potential to be seen by someone, sometime, somewhere. This potential single gaze is sufficient to endow the work of art with meaning. To a large extent, the heroes of history, its main characters, are actors with a stage and audience larger than usual. The only difference might be that if their audience is not contemporaneous - their "art" undergoes a change in magnitude: it is either dining...
Free research essays on topics related to: human activity, word meaning, human activities, context, work of art
Research essay sample on Work Of Art Word Meaning
