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What is meaningful to one may not be meaningful to the other. Accordingly, any borrowed, induced, imposed meaning can turn into nonsense.
Let's divide the question into form and content. In form, it is a play on words, and a play on words never involves a real philosophical problem. In terms of content, the question boils down to the following: can a thing be called itself without having the qualities of itself? The answer is no.
Meaning doesn't make sense when it's just not needed and you don't need to search for it.
This is especially true for human actions. Well, everyone laments: Why did this person do this? What's the point?. Nothing at all. He's an idiot.
Or for example natural phenomena. Nature looks purple on us and has no concept of meaning. �For example, the death of Pompeii. Meaning zero, but the volcano still covered.
Also, a meaning doesn't make sense when there was no request to search for that meaning.
Or the meaning may be lost when some phenomenon or object is saturated with meanings. For example, the Malevich Square. He was already so tormented by meanings that the whole meaning was lost.
Over-meaning also doesn't make �sense. Well, this is when a person raises some meaning to the absolute and explains absolutely everything to them.
It also makes no sense to look for meaning in initially irrational and vague things(not because something is complicated, but because it is not finalized even at the level of thinking).
Randomness and chance don't make sense. Sometimes circumstances just happen one way or another. A good person, for example, died. There is no point in his death. Just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For the most part, respected respondents tend to abstract the nature of the question (its real or imaginary paradoxicity), separating the meaning and its nonsense either “in space”, i.e. relative to different subjects (for one there is a meaning, for another there is not), or “in time” (today I saw the meaning, and tomorrow I was disappointed in it). It seems to me that Artem Tyurin's answer more accurately captures the intention and meaning of Den Shemetov's question and … exposes it as a quasi-meaning and quasi-question 🙂
In the case of external opposition, both of these positions are implicitly based on the assumption that meaning and/or the absence of meaning are established and defined as such in a certain human-sized field of the possibility of meaning. In other words: 1. there can be no meaning; meaninglessness, lack of meaning is a negative degree of its presence, a negative form of its due / confirmation; 2. meaning cannot but be human; in addition to anthropomorphic in content and anthropocentric in form definitions of meaning/meaninglessness, no other definitions are possible.
Here are some examples of the answer to the question, which seems to go beyond the above restrictions. The names and contents of the examples are working, i.e. they are not absolutely strict and precise, but they allow you to emphasize the specifics of the examples.
The awe and delight that a person feels when he is captured by the beauty of natural phenomena are not derived from the objective properties of these phenomena. “Nature does not tolerate emptiness,” but neither does beauty – that is, it does not contain it as an objective basis for the aesthetic experience of a person contemplating… this beauty. But the person himself, outside the experience of such contemplation, does not have a pre-defined ideal or model of beauty, which is only superimposed on a natural phenomenon and determines a meaningful aesthetic reaction. the beauty of nature as its aesthetic meaningfulness is groundless, given only in a living experience that cannot be reduced to the external meanings of the object (natural) or subject. A great poetic parallel to this thesis is found in V. Nabokov https://soulibre.ru/Sadom_shel_christos_schristen_(Vladimir_Nabokov)
“Meaninglessness” of the meaning of life (human, but what else?). The average person is often fascinated by the question about the meaning of life and disappointed with a competent answer to it, because in this case the romantic expectation of an unambiguous and positive answer, if not exhaustive, is not justified. Instead, secular and religious thinkers and teachers say something about the path, the effort, the responsibility of the questioner himself about meaning, and other things that push back the cherished acquisition of meaning as truth. However, it is precisely the acquired universal, i.e., a meaning that is universally valid and historically complete (for everyone, for everyone, and forever) would be a disaster, since historically it would mark finalism, and sociologically it would mark totalitarianism. Such a format of “meaning”, despite its obvious humanity (in a wide range from “Everything in the name of man, everything for the good of man” to “Human, too human”), would be truly inhuman and meaningless. Conversely, “meaninglessness” as a rejection of externally guaranteed meanings in favor of your own work on building a horizon of values and guidelines that are significant to you will be justified as a meaningful position and effort. The literary and philosophical parallel to this thesis is A.Camus ” The Myth of Sisyphus. An essay on the absurd.”
M. Mamardashvili in” Lectures on Ancient Philosophy ” has a wonderful story:
That is, what seems to us absolutely random and therefore irrelevant to our interest as a process or violation of a known necessity, which in terms and logic of this necessity can be explained as an exception or eliminated as insignificant, can be an expression of another whole, which is obviously phenomenal, but at the same time is not perceived in its own essence. We do not see the meaning (we do not perceive something as meaningful), but it is, is as a “different meaning”. Not another content that is different (even alternative) from our own, interpreted in a common system of meanings (in a common semantic horizon), but such a foreign system of meanings that cannot be interpreted by the means available to us, and therefore do not allow us to detect (through the measure of correspondence/inconsistency) this “other meaning”. And just attempts to impose existing meanings on new phenomena, to give unusual phenomena explanations that have worked so far can “show” their meaninglessness so deep that the error may not even be noticed!
An excellent example of this situation in the 60s of the last century was given by S. Lem in the novel “Solaris”. His hero Chris Kelvin managed to get closer to understanding what is happening on the planet of the same name, only when he hardly, but still rejected adequate by human standards (so to speak, natural) explanations of mysterious events. Chris stopped looking for the meaning (explanation) “behind” the phenomena, took them as a different meaning (message) itself, not yet readable, but at least fixed. Solaris ceased to be an impersonal silent platform of events, gained a face (subjectivity) and a voice (events are this voice).
The modern world-real, not fictional, in my opinion, today is close to the “Solaris” plot, though in a less optimistic perspective…
maybe, if this meaning is false. For example, a person came up with a meaning for himself, or took it for granted and devoted his life to it – and as a result, it turned out that he was deceived and his meaning actually does not make sense. This happens very often and thickly – people spend their lives on meaningless activities and aspirations that seemed to them the meaning of life.
The carpenter died and appeared in heaven before the Lord.
“I envy you, Master!
“Oh, my God! Why should I be jealous???
– And the fact that the stools made by you do not run after you and do not ask what the meaning of life is?!�
The term “meaning “is used in logic and the science of language as a synonym for the word”meaning”. In some philosophical theories, the meaning (for example, Frege and Church) of the term “meaning.” is used to denote that mental content, that information that is associated with a given linguistic expression, which is a proper (although perhaps descriptive) name, in contrast to the “meaning” (object) called by this expression.
I suspect that in your question you use the word “meaning” in a linguistic and logical sense. To put it simply, when we talk about meaning and at the same time about its absence, in everyday speech we usually mean whether there is logic in a person's actions, in his words, or in his actions.�
For you, for example, it makes sense to pay 1000 rubles for some item, but for someone your actions will seem devoid of any meaning. Perhaps your opponent has his own opinion or experience in buying the same item, and he does not see the point in your actions to pay 1000 rubles. It turns out that your actions, in which you see meaning, from the point of view of another person do not make any sense.�
The most interesting thing is that neither philosophy nor logic has yet given a precise definition of the term “meaning”. So don't look for meaning or lack of it. It's like looking for a ghostly truth about the meaning of life.