Published on July 15, 2025 2:29 PM GMT
I have read David Chapman's online "book" Meaningness. I find his concept of nebulosity very useful, and his treatment of intellectual history is at least very interesting.
But his whole book is supposed to be about "meaning", and I have never really understood what Chapman means when he talks about meaning. The bulk of the book details the conflict between what Chapman calls eternalism and nihilism, but most of his concrete examples of meaning seem extremely far removed from that conflict, and I struggle to bridge the gap.
Chapman likes to say that meaningfulness is "obvious" and gives some examples:
If you haven’t eaten in a couple days, then the meaningfulness of food is obvious. This isn’t a sophisticated case of meaning, but it’s one that’s hard to deny. We share it with other animals; it’s in our biology, not some arbitrary personal or social choice.
If I am hungry, then food feel subjectively important to me, yes. What does that have to do with eternalism and nihilism?
Different foods have different meanings; there’s fancy food and boring food and comfort food. What foods have which meanings vary somewhat from person to person and culture to culture, but some food is fancy enough that nearly everyone will agree it’s fancy.
People have opinions about food and emotional associations with food, yes. What does that have to do with eternalism and nihilism.
On a busy sidewalk, your eyes lock for an instant with those of a cute stranger coming toward you, and then they pass. You stop and look back over your shoulder and see that they have done the same. You can see that this is meaningful—even if it’s not exactly clear what it will mean—and an attentive third person would see the same.
What the hell? Yes, if someone stops and looks back at me, then I can derive information from that. I can derive that it is moderately likely that the person is interested in me, and it might be worth my while to try to talk to them. This seems to me extremely simple and pragmatic. What does that have to do with all the philosophy?
All these examples, as far as I can tell, are fully compatible with what Chapman calls nihilism. But these exact examples form Chapman's attempt to refute nihilism: Because there exists "meaningfulness" as described in these 3 examples and a few more, nihilism is obviously false, according to Chapman.
Now, I do not feel a lack of meaning nor a search for meaning in my life. I am very concerned with ethics, but alas, Chapman's treatment of ethics is woefully unfinished. Chapman seems very confident that he knows the answers to most if not all questions of ethics (and he contemptuously dismisses most moral philosophers and their work), but he provides very little in the way of arguments or explanations. Indeed, precisely because he is so sure of himself, I strongly suspect that Chapman does not understand ethics nearly as well as he thinks he does.
Is there anyone else who has read Meaningness and can help me understand what Chapman is talking about when he talks about... well, meaningness?
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