David Chapman book https://meaningness.com/

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

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Table of Contents

Why meaningness? Informally introducing the central themes of the Meaningness book.

• An appetizer: purpose: Five confused attitudes to life purpose, as an introduction to meaningness.
• Preview: eternalism and nihilism: Two stances that don't work: “Everything has a definite meaning” and “Nothing means anything.”
• What is meaningness?: Meaningness is the quality of being meaningful or meaningless.
• Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable: Mistaken attitudes toward meaning create unnecessary psychological/spiritual/existential suffering.

Stances: responses to meaningness: The overall conceptual framework: “stances” are simple patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness.

• Stances trump systems: People think they approach meaning in terms of religions or philosophies, but in practice, "stances" matter more.
• Stances are unstable: Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.
• Nebulosity: Meaningness is cloud-like: nebulous. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.
• Pattern: Brains automatically find meaning and pattern; we need them to act. Unfortunately, brains also find meaning and pattern where there are none.
• Fixation and denial: Fixation and denial are the two simplest ways of refusing to deal with the nebulosity of meaningness.
• Confused stances come in pairs: Wrong ideas about meaning come in mirror-image pairs, which fixate and deny opposite aspects of reality.
• No middle way: Polarized pairs of confused stances cannot be resolved by compromise. There is no middle way between them.
• Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning: Confusions about meaning can be resolved using a method for looking at ways nebulosity affects the subject matter.
• Confusion, completion, misery and joy: Properly understanding meaning eliminates needless suffering. An application: ethics.
• Meaningness as a liberating practice: A practice of replacing confused, dysfunctional patterns of thinking and feeling about meaning with accurate ones.
• The psychological anatomy of a stance: The key aspects of a stance toward meaning, and how to use them effectively.
• Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating: Concerning relationships one may have with stances: basic attitudes toward meaningness.
• The Big Three stance combinations: Dualism, nihilism, and monism are the three main approaches to fundamental questions of meaning. This book proposes a better, fourth alternative.
• Schematic overview: all dimensions: A complete summary overview of all the dimensions of meaningness, with all the common stances one can take to them.

Meaning and meaninglessness: Eternalism fixates meaning; nihilism denies it. Recognizing that meaning is both nebulous and patterned resolves this false dichotomy.

• The puzzle of meaningness: What is the meaning of an extra-marital affair—or any relationship? A philosophical short story illustrates the puzzle of the nebulosity of meaningness.
• Meaningfulness and meaninglessness: Some things are meaningful, and others aren't. This is obvious; yet most confusions about meaning begin by denying it.
• Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism: Claims that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is, are motivated by fears: fear of the opposite.
• ⚒︎ No cosmic plan: Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.
• So how does meaningness work?: We have a choice of explanations: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right.
• Rumcake and rainbows: Meaning cannot be either objective or subjective. But meaning does exist: as interaction.
• Schematic overview: meaningness: A schematic overview of eternalism and nihilism as confused responses to meaningness.
• Eternalism: the fixation of meaning: Eternalism is the wrong idea that everything has a definite meaning, fixed by an external ordering principle.
• Nihilism: denying meaning: Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning.
• ⚒︎ Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God: Existentialism, a hopeful alternative to rigid meanings, makes wrong metaphysical assumptions, and cannot work. It collapses inevitably into nihilism.
• The complete stance: Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle. Recognizing this frees us from metaphysical delusions.

Unity and diversity: Stances concerning connection and separateness: monism, dualism, and participation.

• Schematic overview: unity and diversity: Schematic overview of the stances concerning connection and separateness: monism, dualism, and participation.
• Monism and dualism contain each other: Monism and dualism are opposites. But because each is obviously wrong, each turns into the other when cornered. Sneaky!
• Boundaries, objects, and connections: Errors of monism and dualism: denying and fixating object boundaries and connections.
• ⚒︎ Monism: the denial of difference: Finding the specifics of life unacceptable motivates the escapist fantasy of monism: the stance that All is One, denying diversity.
• ⚒︎ Dualism: the fixation of difference: Fear of contamination by the messiness of reality—always changing and ambiguous—motivates dualism, the stance that denies connection.
• ⚒︎ Participation: Participation is the recognition that both boundaries and connections are both nebulous yet real; neither objective nor subjective.

Selfness: Abandoning selflessness and egoism equally, we can play with the ambiguous self/other boundary; supple, skillful selfing for successful, satisfying interaction.

• Schematic overview: self: A schematic overview of stances regarding the meaningness of the self: non-self, True Self, and intermittently continuing.
• ⚒︎ A billion tiny spooks: Representationalism tried to exorcise the ghost in the machine, but succeeded only in splitting it into innumerable tiny ghosts.
• ⚒︎ The true self: Monism and dualism both offer concepts of the supposed true self as a coherent entity.
• ⚒︎ Selflessness: Several views of selflessness, in different religions and philosophies.
• ⚒︎ Intermittently continuing: An optimistic view of the self as incoherent, but not non-existent, and not necessarily problematic.

Purpose: Dividing purposes into higher and mundane, mission pursues higher ends and rejects pragmatism; materialism seeks only selfish goals. Both are mistakes.

• Schematic overview: purpose: A schematic overview of stances toward purpose: mission, materialism, and enjoyable usefulness.
• Mission: It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Unfortunately, this belief is both false and harmful.
• Materialism: Materialism says that only mundane purposes like money, sex, and power count. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate.
• Mission and materialism mingled: Mingling mission and materialism attempts to gain both self-indulgent and self-justifying goals—but loses both enjoyment and empathetic joy.
• ⚒︎ Enjoyable usefulness: Recognizing the nebulosity of purposes frees us to enjoy life and be useful to others.

⚒︎ Personal value: Agonizing over whether you are ordinary or special—or feeling smug about one or the other—can be resolved by choosing to be noble instead.

• Schematic overview: value: A schematic overview of stances toward personal value: specialness, ordinariness, and nobility.
• ⚒︎ Specialness: Specialness is a sense of having been picked out for destiny by the Cosmic Plan. That causes you and others much trouble.
• ⚒︎ Ordinariness: If we could just manage to be ordinary, we would not have the responsibility of living up to our potential. Fortunately, ordinariness is impossible.
• ⚒︎ Nobility: Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others.

⚒︎ Capability: Resolving a false dichotomy between unrealistic views: being a helpless victim and being totally responsible for your circumstances.

• Schematic overview: capability: A schematic overview of stances regarding issues of capability.
• ⚒︎ Total responsibility: The delusion that we are, or can be, totally responsible for reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles.
• ⚒︎ Victim-think: Victim-think is a strategy for denying all responsibility—on the part of individuals and social groups.
• ⚒︎ Light-heartedness: Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world.

⚒︎ Ethics: Available ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist; both are useless. We must recognize that ethics are both nebulous and meaningful.

• Schematic overview: ethics: A schematic overview of fundamental stances regarding ethics.
• ⚒︎ Ethical eternalism: An ethical system that reliably delivers correct moral judgements is a wishful fantasy. No such system is possible.
• ⚒︎ Ethical nihilism: Ethical nihilism is the denial of all ethical rightness and wrongness.
• ⚒︎ Ethical responsiveness: Ethics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source.

⚒︎ Authority: A better alternative to the dysfunctional stances of mindlessly opposing authority and mindlessly obeying.

• Schematic overview: authority: A schematic overview of stances toward social authority.
• ⚒︎ Reasonable respectability: Reasonable respectability: the sheep's stance to social authority.
• ⚒︎ Romantic rebellion: Romantic rebellion does not seriously try to overthrow the system; it is faux-heroic posturing. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art.
• ⚒︎ Freedom: Value social order as a resource, satirize it as an impediment.

⚒︎ Sacredness: Resolving the twin delusions that nothing is sacred and that the only sacred things are those designated by some authority.

• Schematic overview: sacredness: Schematic overview of stances toward sacredness: religiosity, secularism, kadag.
• ⚒︎ Religiosity: Religiosity is the confused, eternalistic view that the sacred and profane can be clearly separated.
• ⚒︎ Secularism: Secularism is the stance that sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred.
• ⚒︎ Kadag: Kadag: Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred.

Meaningness and Time: past, present, future: The problems of meaningness we face now are dramatically different from those of the past. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.

• How meaning fell apart: Over the past century, systems of meaning gradually disintegrated, and a series of new modes of meaningness developed.
• Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness: A positive and realistic vision for the future of society, culture, and self, drawing lessons from recent history.
• ⚒︎ Sailing the seas of meaningness: Social, cultural, and personal fluidity create vessels to navigate the ocean of atomized meanings, steering between nihilism and eternalism.

Appendices: A series of appendices, including a glossary and suggestions for further reading elsewhere.

• Appendix: Glossary: Definitions of words I've used in technical or non-standard ways in Meaningness.
• Appendix: Further reading: Explore the ideas of Meaningness in greater depth by reading the books that inspired it
• Appendix: Terminological choices: The Meaningness book gives some words distinctive technical meanings; some definitional choices could be misleading.