Q&A: Potential for Identifying Values
Potential for Identifying Values
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi,
A. I wanted to ask a somewhat strange question: if a person is capable of understanding the expression "life has meaning," but on the other hand consciously does not hold that life has meaning, can it still be said that, because of his ability to understand this concept on the potential level, this does show that he believes there is objective meaning in one way or another?
Because if he holds that there is absolutely no meaning at all, then from his perspective that concept should be complete gibberish, no? For example, can you understand someone talking about what a turtle feels when it sees the sea? Or an alien from another planet? Certainly not. So it seems that one cannot speak of understanding a concept when one rejects it categorically.
B. And I wanted to ask the same question about all values. For example, if a person fully understands the claim that helping another person is a good act and is capable of arguing with people who hold objective morality, but on the other hand consciously thinks that there is no such thing as "good" at all, isn't there some problem with this kind of debate, since according to his own view it should have been like a dialogue of the deaf?
Answer
A. If he understands the concept of meaning in itself, apart from life, I don't see any reason he couldn't also understand the phrase "the meaning of life," even though in his opinion life has no meaning.
B. That is not similar. If in his opinion there is no such thing as good, then that is a denial of the concept itself and not just of one particular instance of it.
Discussion on Answer
But the concept of "meaning" appears in both in the same sense. It's like the concept of a living creature with respect to an animal that lives in the air or in the sea.
B. Thank you. I did indeed think there was a problem with that.
A. Isn't objective meaning a different concept from subjective meaning, for example because in a world without values there could be no sense to the expression objective meaning in terms of how one *ought* to live? So it still seems that there is some sort of leap here, no?