Dirt is not meaningful outside the various human practices of making it meaningful. — bloodninja
It is when a plurality of creatures draw correlations between the same things that meaning is shared. It is when a creature draws correlations between things that meaning is attributed. — creativesoul
Seems that the duck has drawn a(some) correlation(s) between their own hunger, earthworms, rain, and/or the dirt. — creativesoul
Does meaning involve anything like a correlation or an attribution. Me don't think so. Meaning is not attributed, rather we are there and in the thick of it, so to speak — bloodninja
In other words, it's not that the dirt lacks meaning and then we attribute it meaning through our gardening activity or some correlation, rather we can only ever garden on the basis of this 'meaning' thing. Thus prior to any attempt to attribute or correlate, meaning already is. — bloodninja
It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. — apokrisis
They are ways we have organised our experience so as to make the best kind of sense of the world ... when construed as a host of constructive possibilities we might exploit. — apokrisis
I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently. — macrosoft
And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution. — apokrisis
The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. — apokrisis
In asking 'what is the meaning of life?', we seem to be asking about unmeaning. It is always ambiguous what the individual person asking is actually getting at, e.g., existence, being, something rather than nothing, life on earth, human life, their life. In almost all cases it seems that an impossible question is asked: What is the meaning or meaninglessness of something that is excluded from meaning/meaninglessness, that is, unmeaning, aka life? — bloodninja
For Heidegger, discursivity, unlike the 'closure upon itself' of Aristotle's self-thinking God, requires openness. Human reason must traverse an open 'space' (constituted by existence as thrown open) within which alone reason can synthesize disparate things. This prior openness is 'the realm that a person traverses every time he or she, as a subject, relates to an object.
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But we are able to do such 'traversing of an open space' in existentiel knowledge and action only because we already are such an open space in our existential essence (a priori and structurally of course, and not of our own volition). Our essence is to be the existential wiggle-room required for existentiel acts of taking-as.
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Over the course of Heidegger's career this open domain would ride under various titles: the clearing, the thrown open realm for being, and so on. This open region --along with the opening of it by our being thrown open or 'brought into our own' (appropriated) --is the core fact, die Sache selbst, of all Heidegger's philosophizing.
— Sheehan
Intelligibility is the name of the world I inhabit as I live into and out of an array of possibilities that I am thematically aware of or not, that I welcome or am indifferent to, that excite or bore me, possibilities that in a sense I myself am in the inevitable process of always having to become myself.
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It is the ineluctable but hidden fact that determines my life and I can never get back behind. That my ontological fate is the be the clearing is evidenced time and time again as I talk with others, manage the things of my life, imagine the future, or remember the past. I cannot not make sense of everything I meet because I cannot not be a priori opened up. By our very nature we are both the demand for and the reason for intelligibility, for a meaningfulness that determines us and yet has know reality apart from us. And there is no way out but death. In fact, the whole process of making sense is mortal. — Sheehan
Since the grasp of concepts intercept life and 'still the stream,' phenomenology must find less intrusive, more natural ways to get a grip on its subject matter, which remain in accord with 'the immanent historicity of life in itself.'
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It involves a phenomenological modification of traditional formalization in order to efface its proclivity toward diremption. All formally indicative concepts aim, strictly speaking, to express only the pure 'out toward' without any further content or ontic fulfillment.
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The conceptual pair motive-tendency (later the pair thrownness-project understood as equiprimordial) is not a duality, but rather the 'motivated tendency' or the 'tending motivation' in which the 'outworlding' of life expresses itself. Expression, articulation, differentiation arises out of a core of indifferentiation which is no longer to be understood in terms of subject-object, form-matter, or any other duality.
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Experienced experience, this streaming return of life back upon itself, is precisely the immanent historicity of life, a certain familiarity or 'understanding' that life already has with itself and that phenomenological intuition must simply 'repeat.' And what is this understanding, whether implicit or methodologically explicit, given to understand? The articulations of life itself, which accrue to the self-experience that occurs in the 'dialectical' return of experiencing life to already experienced life...Once again, life is not mute but meaningful, it 'expresses' itself precisely in and through its self-experience and spontaneous self-understanding.
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The full historical I finds itself caught up in meaningful contexts so that it oscillates according to the rhythmics of worlding, it properizes itself to the articulations of an experience which is governed by the immanent historicity of life in itself. For the primal It of the life stream is more than the primal I. It is the self experiencing itself experiencing the worldly. The ultimate source of the deep hermeneutics of life is properly an irreducible 'It' that precedes and enables the I. It is the unity and whole of the 'sphere of experience' understood as a self-sufficient domain of meaning that phenomenology seeks to approach, 'understandingly experience,' and bring to appropriate language. — Kiesel paraphrasing Heidegger
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