It has been a long time since the logical positivists held sway in the departments of philosophy. They had their virtues no doubt, and they remain worth reading, but it is good they are gone. They were a narrow-minded lot who branded as meaningless plenty that was plainly meaningful, the question of the meaning of human life, to give just one example. Roughly, these philistines held that all meaning is linguistic meaning. They found no room for existential meaning, the meaning of human Existenz. (I employ the German word for the sake of its allusions to Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, who of course were influenced by Søren Kierkegaard. You should start with him, the Danish Socrates, to get a sense of what existentialism is all about. I use 'human life' and 'human Existenz' interchangeably.) And being the philistines and narrow-pates they were, they would snort derisively at the mere mention of names such as 'Kierkegaard,' et al. Their attitude, and that of latter-day positivists such as David Stove, is contemptible, and I am properly contemptuous of it.
A. How do existential and linguistic meaning differ? One difference, noted by Kurt Baier (
Problems of Life and Death, Prometheus 1997, p. 48 f.) is that it is clear that words and sentences have meaning even when it is not clear what meaning they have. But it is not clear that life has meaning. In both cases, 'What is the meaning?' presupposes that there is meaning. But in the case of human life it is not clear that this presupposition is satisfied. Compare:
1. No word or sentence has meaning
with
2. No human life has meaning.
(1) is preposterous and indeed incoherent: if (1) were true, then (1) would be meaningless and hence neither true nor false. But (2) can be maintained with some show of plausibility. This is so even if we reject the positivist stricture against existential meaning. Suppose there is no categorial bar to a life's possessing meaning, in the way there is a categorial bar to a thought's having volume. Suppose, that is, that a human life (categorially) could have a meaning. It still might be the case that no human life does have a meaning.
The point, then, is that while the question 'What is the meaning?' presupposes that there is a meaning both in the linguistic and the existential cases, the presupposition is self-evidently satisfied only in the linguistic case. One should infer from this that existential meaning is not a form of linguistic meaning. "But that's obvious!" Really? To cop a line from Hilary Putnam, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."
B. Although existential meaning is not a species of linguistic meaning, it is worth exploring whether a life could be a vehicle of linguistic meaning. Suppose a misspent youth issues in a man's life-long incarceration. One might say of such a man, 'His life shows that crime does not pay.' This is a bit of evidence for the thesis that a life can have lingusitic meaning: the life can be reasonably taken to express the proposition that crime does not pay. And since it is clear that gestures and looks have linguistic meaning, it is not too much of a stretch to suppose than an entire life could be a vehicle of linguistic meaning.
Meaningful looks: there is the look that says 'I don't believe a word you are saying.' I've even had students who gave me a look that bespoke a conjunctive proposition: I don't believe what you are saying & you don't believe it either. So if looks and gestures can carry linguistic meaning, then perhaps lives can as well.
But even if this so, it gives no aid and comfort to the notion that existential meaning is a type of linguistic meaning. For the connection between a vehicle of linguistic meaning and the meaning conveyed is based on convention. But the meaning of my life, if it has a meaning, is not based on convention.
I believe we can safely put paid to the notion that existential meaning is assimilable to linguistic meaning.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.