[lit-ideas] Re: The Meaning of Life
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 05:12:04 -0400
In a message dated 4/23/2015 10:30:47 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Chomsky's implicature to Marx not withstanding or withsitting or laying
down (lying down?) -- or cela ne fait rien as we like to say in Paris
(Tennessee, that is). I do agree fully with JLS in his assertion: "The French
lack the idea of 'meaning'. Indeed they do. So do we all. We all want to
mean things, of course. No one knows just why we do. Or what meaning means.
But as Marx once remarked: " That's a capital idea!! But he never
specified just what he meant. Me neither.
Indeed. As Mrs. Marx once implicated to Mr. Marx (but however, the
implicature went apparently over his head), and then she was talking to her
neighbour, over the fence, "_He_" (meaning his hubby) should spend more time
bringing SOME home, rather than writing TONS about it."
She was referring to Marx's opus magnum.
The French lack the idea of 'meaning'.
For that matter, also the Italians. Cfr. this from Wikipedia:
"Monty Python - Il senso della vita (Monty Python's The Meaning of Life) è
una commedia cinematografica interpretata dal gruppo comico britannico dei
Monty Python. Il film consiste in una serie di sketch comici sui diversi
stadi della vita, nello stile degli sketch della serie televisiva Monty
Python's Flying Circus. Il film si aggiudicò il Grand Prix Speciale della
Giuria
al 36º Festival di Cannes."
Now, Umberto Eco, who taught semiotics at Bologna, would perhaps laugh, in
an Italian way, at this. For semioticians, 'senso' is something FREGE
thought it existed (vide Max Black and P. T. Geach, "On sense and reference",
their translation of Frege's essay: Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung).
In "Sense and Sensibilia", J. Austin, the philosopher, used to say that
it's best to understand
'meaning'
alla Frege
to represent (a) sense
------------------(b) reference
So Monty Phyton's quest becomes one for the sense and the reference of
Life.
The Reference of Life seems easy enough: the reference of Terry Jones's
life, the reference of Eric Idle's life, etc. Note that 'the' applies to
"meaning", not to "life" (it's notably NOT "the meaning of the life". Monty
Phython think that to generalise over "the life" can be otiose, and when they
do speak about "the life" is usually about the life of this or that
individual: hence their other film: The Life of Brian Cohen.
The 'sense' of 'life' can be ambiguous. Usually, there seems to be four
'senses': upwards, downwards, to the right, and to the left (in the highway
code, only to the right and to the left, since cars don't fly or submerge).
This is _not_ the idea of 'sense' in the Italian translation, "Il senso
della vita".
The film was translated to French also using 'sens':
"Monty Python : Le Sens de la vie (Monty Python's The Meaning of Life) est
un film britannique réalisé par Terry Jones, sorti en 1983. Ce film a
obtenu le Grand Prix Spécial du Jury au Festival de Cannes."
But 'sens', and Italian 'senso' is not really a Greco-Roman philosophical
lexicon, and I'm not surprised Peirce (who loved a Greco-Roman philosophical
lexicon) never appealed to (or felt an appeal for) 'sense'.
Cheers,
Speranza
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