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.

The gardener gardens the soil. The soil becomes meaningful to the gardener solely by virtue of the correlations drawn by the gardener between the soil and things aside from the soil. When the gardener draws a correlation between the soil and his/her own blood sweat and tears, the soil becomes meaningful. When the gardener draws correlations between the soil and the food that it can help provide, the soil becomes a meaningful part of a source of food.

This notion of 'unmeaning' seems unnecessary,

Dirt is not meaningful outside the various human practices of making it meaningful. — bloodninja

My ducks plough their own bills through the dirt while chasing earthworms after a rain. It seems to me that after this happens enough, the ducks come to have some expectation about finding earthworms in the dirt after a rain. The more it happens, the more often they go looking even during times when there is not an earthworm on the surface.

Seems that the duck has drawn a(some) correlation(s) between their own hunger, earthworms, rain, and/or the dirt. The same could be said of them regarding me and their duck food.

I think it is a mistake to presuppose or conclude that attributing meaning is something that is exclusive to humans.

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. We don't draw correlations or attribute anything to the dirt; this seems like a very "philosophical" way of thinking about the world. Rather, the dirt is understood on the basis of our shared human practices, what might be called our background practices, including gardening. We don't have to be a gardener to find the dirt meaningful in this way since meaning is not a correlation but is the shared structure that we are in. 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.

Ducks are indeed drawn to dig in the wet dirt for worms. But is this meaningful?

Hi. When it comes to the meaning of 'meaning,' I'd say context, context, context. Or just holism. Just as there is no single piece of equipment, there is no single meaning (IMO.) The 'unit' of meaning is intelligible existence itself. Yes, we can focus on the use of particular words, and we can write dictionaries that are useful, but I think there's always a certain 'violence' involved, an abstraction or yanking-out of a plant that kills it. Or we can think of pinned butterflies. They tell something about living butterflies, but they are dead.

As far as 'the meaning of life' goes, I personally think I know 'what' is meant, if we want to call it a what. No one would deny that their ordinary experience is intelligible. I think what some fear to be missing is a kind of central thread. In some ways, the thirst for meaning is a desire to be dominated, to have a master and thereby to escape from freedom. On the other hand, there is the desire to identify with this master, and to speak commands and truths in its name. I think of a moth that would like to finally be burned in a flame and become the flame, drawing in other moths.

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

But meaning is attributed because there is a sign relation involved. The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. A good gardener will be reading the dirt for its particular qualities. Does is display the signs of being fertile, loamy, acid, bony, whatever? But the worried parent of a child scrabbling in the soil might just see "bad dirt" and nothing more.

So meaningfulness is neither in the mind, nor in the world. It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. Everything is suitably categorised according to useful habit. It is meaningful in being a bridge between a self, with its desires, and a world, with its possibilities. The sign encodes a relation in which self and world are semantically connected.

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

The mistake is to get hung up on trying to assign meaning to either side of this relation rather than to the relation itself. Meaningfulness arises where there is this semiotic connection that itself marks off a clear distinction - an epistemic cut - between "a self" and "the world".

There would be any number of points of view of what "dirt" is. How could it be defined in any truly mind-independent sense? We could talk about agglomerations of clay particles, ecologies of bacteria. But those are all words with meanings. They are the signs of "things that constitute that kind of world we are talking about". 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.

It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. — apokrisis

I like this. I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently.

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 share this general perspective. To be human is largely to be a theater of possibility which is organized by hope and fear (among other things). We search the space of the possible for application to the actual. And both the possible and the actual have an intelligibility/structure that is almost irreducible (active here in this conversation), especially given an holistic conception of meaning.

I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently. — macrosoft

Yep. That is what I would mean by calling it a habit that is formed. It becomes routine or automatic. The relationship is maximally meaningful in becoming maximally certain. And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution.

And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution. — apokrisis

I agree, and what fascinates me is how so much of these unthinking habits function as a sort of dark foundation for habits that still require thinking. Using language, for instance, seems to be mostly automatic. Philosophers often get tangled up by trying to establish single meanings for words removed from context. While clarification is sometimes useful, the attempt to clarify often just creates a mess where habit or blind know-how was/is working just fine.

The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. — apokrisis

I like the theme of seeing as, which suggests a unity of sensation and imagination. I see the dirt and what I can do with it more or less simultaneously, so that the possible and the actual are experienced together. Since accurately seeing promise and danger are of the utmost importance, it makes sense that we would evolve to perceive a meaning-rich or sign-spangled environment. And then it also makes sense that the meaning or signs that jut out are those most relevant at the moment to the moment's needs. To reduce the search space, it is vital that many objects in the environment are habitually or unconsciously eliminated. It's my understanding that illusionists play on such habits, by steering such unconscious filtering with false leads.

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

Have you happened to look at Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger:A Paradigm Shift? It's one of the best reads I've had in a while. He insists the Heidegger's central thought was indeed existence as the world as the thrown-open-clearing for meaning.

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

He interprets being as meaningful presence, and framed the being question in terms of the source of intelligibility.

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

Lots more great passages like this in the book. Being-here is being the mortal, thrown open space for meaning-making.

So I agree in some sense asking for a meaning of life is asking for the outside of life. On the other hand it is just the same old expression of meaning making trying to grasp the whole. What's it all about? Not this or that meaning. But what are all of these little meanings about? If Sheehan is right, then Heidegger offers the self-consciousness of mortal, groundless meaning-making. To me this is beautiful as a kind of negative theology. The groundlessness is the 'miracle' of being thrown-open 'absurdly' to being-in-the-world-with-others or world-being, being-a-world, or being-the-space-within-the-space. As Kojeve wrote, Heidegger accepts or integrates death.

This for me is symbolically assenting to the incarnation, a Christian negative theology. It lets go of any kind of god/ground/fixed-point beyond the meaning-making of mortals who both make the meaning and also are the very space in which this is possible--which space is also temporality -- Being and Time means intelligible presence and the thrown open clearing (Dasein-World) that makes it possible and sustains it. Those who still ask for a meaning of life tremble before an intuition of their groundlessness, to being condemned to mortal freedom. Is this a flight from life? And yet it's also a flight from death and groundlessness. So, yeah, maybe a flight from life.

Interesting comment as always!

I tried reading that book a while ago but found at the time that I didn't feel comfortable with his reduction of being to meaning. Thanks for your comment I'll head to the library and have another read of it soon. I think Sheenan is on to it, and very clear as you said.

Indeed, it may be a misreading or a shift of emphasis. After a slow start, however, the book takes off. Even if Sheehan is wrong, his misreading is a great work of philosophy. If Heidegger really did think one basic thought, then something like Sheehan's book should be possible that really gets at this basic thought. I've been re-reaing texts in the light of this idea, and I'm inclined to read time as future as the open hermeneutical space. The present as making present (action that brings forth) is directed (I think you'll agree) by the future. Things are taken-as in terms of future as possibility, hence the dominance of the actual/actionable by the possible. (Not expecting this to be new to you, just framing my understanding.) The abyss between man and the animals would seem to depend on meaning, being as meaningful presence in the light of the future as possibility. So one has the mystery that anything is intelligible at all, and one has the mystery of the thrown open hermeneutical space that allows us to experience this as a mystery. We aren't immersed in particular meanings but can rise up somehow to ask after the possibility of meaning itself. We can even cognize the thrown open space. Sheehan calls this kind of thing transcendentalism to the second power (or maybe H himself did.)


Kiesel makes a big deal out lecture KNS 1919 as Heidegger's breakthrough. He sketches it in The Genesis of Being and Time. Kiesel also suggests that the 'turn' was maybe just going back to KNS 1919 insights and trying to say the same general thing in a better way. In this lecture (as you may know) Heidegger is trying to figure out how a 'pre-science' is possible. How does one grasp life in its utter facticity without choking it with theory?

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

In my view, the above supports Sheehan's vision, though I do think Sheehan decided to emphasize meaning. He obtains a great coherence of his own project via this emphasis. He very much presents one Heidegger and not two.