Meaning vs Recognition

For a while, there was a fad for searching for "the meaning of life."  Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning".  He had been partly inspired by Nietzsche, who wrote that "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

But in my opinion, all this business about "meaning" is one-sided.  People do not really search for meaning - or at least, not exclusively.  What people want is recognition. 

People are not purely seeking for "meaning" or "purpose," a "for which" for all of their actions.  Sure, some people are struggle to come to some kind of understanding of what the purpose of their own actions is.  You get up in the morning.  Why?  To make breakfast.  Why?  To eat breakfast.  Why?  As part of your preparation for the day.  Why?  To go to work.  Why?  To make money.  Why?  To bring home the money.  Why?  To buy things.  Why?  So that you will have things.  Why?  Because you like things.  Why?  Because they make you happy.  Why?  Because they satisfy some kind of desire that you have.  Why?  And so on.  Eventually this chain of reasons either goes somewhere or it goes nowhere.  Going around in circles is a version of going nowhere.  To say that the chain goes somewhere is to say that there is a final purpose, a final cause, the cause of all causes.  One name that people have given to such a final cause is "God".  It is precisely the loss of a sense of a final cause that Nietzsche called "the death of God."

To want a purpose is, in a certain sense, to desire to be a willing slave.  It is a desire for a set of instructions, or commands, as a primary motivation.  It is a desire to be an object, a desire to be a tool.  What has purpose?  Tools have purpose.

But people want more than that: they want recognition.  They don't just want God to tell them what to do, and when they ask why, for the answer to be "Because I said so."  Such a life would be just as meaningless and absurd as a life without anyone to give life meaning.

Unlike mere meaning, recognition is a two-way street.  People don't just want God to tell them what to do, but to recognize them.  Some may say that the desire for meaning is "selfless".  Maybe so.  But the pure desire for meaning is what Hegel called "the unhappy consciousness."  (Nietzsche would be my primary example of an unhappy consciousness.  Perhaps Philipp Mainländer is another example.)

Is it "selfish" to desire recognition?  Yes and no.  To desire recognition is to desire to be truly recognized.  That's the paradox of recognition: gaining recognition from those whom we do not respect would not satisfy; nor would it satisfy to gain recognition that we do not deserve.

We don't just want a purpose for what we do - we want recognition for doing something.  That is the pity of our condition.  Maybe we "shouldn't" want recognition - but we do.  

The paradoxes don't end there.  At one level, we want recognition - from God, say, or, you might say, from the Other - for doing what the Other tells us to do.  But at another level, we want to be recognized as beings capable of determining our own rational purpose and our own destiny.