Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
(A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it.)
Book contents
- Why meaningness?
- Stances: responses to meaningness
- Stances trump systems
- Stances are unstable
- Nebulosity
- Pattern
- Fixation and denial
- Confused stances come in pairs
- No middle way
- Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning
- Confusion, completion, misery and joy
- Meaningness as a liberating practice
- The psychological anatomy of a stance
- Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating
- Doing meaning better
- The Big Three stance combinations
- Schematic overview: all dimensions
- Meaning and meaninglessness
- The puzzle of meaningness
- Meaningfulness and meaninglessness
- Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism
- So how does meaningness work?
- Schematic overview: meaningness
- Eternalism: the fixation of meaning
- I get duped by eternalism in a casino
- The appeal of eternalism
- Eternalism is harmful
- Eternalist ploys and their antidotes
- ⚒ Imposing fixed meanings
- ⚒ Smearing meaning all over everything
- ⚒ Magical thinking
- ⚒ Hope
- ⚒ Pretending
- ⚒ Colluding for eternalism
- ⚒ Hiding from nebulosity
- ⚒ Kitsch and naïveté
- ⚒ Armed & armored eternalism
- ⚒ Faith
- ⚒ Thought suppression
- ⚒ Bargaining and recommitment
- ⚒ Wistful certainty
- ⚒ Faithful bafflement
- ⚒ Mystification
- ⚒ Rehearsing the horrors of nihilism
- ⚒ Purification
- ⚒ Fortress eternalism
- Accomplishing eternalism
- Exiting eternalism
- Non-theistic eternalism
- ⚒ Atheism: a good first step
- ⚒ Belief in belief
- ⚒ How space aliens make everything meaningful
- Rationalist ideologies as eternalism
- Wrong-way reductions
- ⚒ Eternalisms as wrong-way reductions
- ⚒ Logic as eternalism
- ⚒ The continuum gambit
- ⚒ Bayesianism is an eternalism
- ⚒ Utilitiarianism is an eternalism
- Perfection Salad
- Nutrition offers its resignation. And the reply
- Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes
- ⚒ A malign modern myth of meaningness: cognitive “science”
- ⚒ Eternalism in politics
- Nihilism: the denial of meaning
- ⚒ Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God
- Meaningness: the complete stance
- Unity and diversity
- Selfness
- ⚒ Purpose
- ⚒ Personal value
- ⚒ Capability
- ⚒ Ethics: a new beginning
- ⚒ Authority
- ⚒ Sacredness
- ⚒ Contingency
- Meaningness and Time: past, present, future
- How meaning fell apart
- A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything
- In praise of choicelessness
- The glory of systems
- Invented traditions and timeworn futures
- Systems of meaning all in flames
- Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp
- What makes a counterculture?
- Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures
- ⚒ The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism
- Renegotiating self and society
- Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self
- The personal is political
- Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise
- ⚒ Countercultures: modern mythologies
- Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism
- ⚒ Counter-cultures: thick and wide
- Why both countercultures failed
- Wreckage: the culture war
- Completing the countercultures
- Subcultures: the diversity of meaning
- Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning
- ⚒ Fluidity: a preview
- Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism
- Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness
- Appendix: Glossary
- Appendix: Terminological choices
Discussion
Read comments and join in.