Meaning and "Man is the measure of all things"

Once one has rejected the idea that God exist and reality as a whole has know eternal interpretation. Man is left in a world lost in the void of nothingness. But can we create meaning up for ourselves. I believe this is not possible. The philosopher Protagoras once said, “Man is the measure of all things”. This implies that man has the power to generate meaning for all things.
But this is clearly false.

Cottingham in his book “The Meaning of Life” says of this view,

“Man, said the philosopher Protagoras, is the measure of all things; of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Socrates had little trouble refuting that piece of pretentiousness. Pretentious it is, in its arrogance; the Psalmist’s cry ‘It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves’. Whatever one may think of the underlying creed, at least has the humility to acknowledge the basic truth that we exist in the universe as wholly contingent beings, dependent on a reality we did not create…We create our theories, certainly, but we can only delay, never ultimately prevent, their collapes when they fail to measure up to the bar of actual experience.”(Cottingham, The meaning of Life, p. 16)

Cottingham says that we do not invent meaning, we discover that we have meaning in our minds because reality has it. Man is not the measure of all things. To a point, reality is the measure of man. Man can only have and be what he has been created to be, wither this is from God or evolution. Yes we may use our meaning to describe a path we have chosen for life, but this does not explain where conciseness meaning comes from!. And our chosen paths are not based in a vacuum where we can create totally our own life and its meaning, as we are a part of reality and society which interferes and places us in its reality messing our chosen plans up.

Nietzsche was another philosopher who thought one could invent meaning from within. Cottinghams writes,

“How does Nietzsche’s heroic attempt to generate meaning from within? By supposing the unaided human will can create meaning, that it can merely by its own resolute affirmation bypass the search for objectively sourced truth and value, he seems to risk coming close to the Protagorean fallacy. For meaning and worth cannot reside in raw will alone; they have to involve a fit between our decisions and beliefs and what grounds those decisions and beliefs. That grounding may, as some religious thinkers maintain, be divinely generated; or it may be based on something else for example certain fundamental facts about our social or biological nature. But it cannot be created by human fait alone.”(Cottingham, The Meaning of Life, p. 17)

I don’t believe it is possible to create meaning from raw will alone. For any goal that we have must be placed in some context of reality to understand our concepts. To start of with the idea of concepts assumes that our thoughts and concepts are meaningful and correspond to some universal ideas, or our thoughts would be empty. If our thoughts and concepts do not have any objective relationship to anything how are we to understand the meaning of our concepts. The point is we do not invent meaning, we reflect that we have a mind of meaningful thoughts that think with universal concepts, which we have some understanding off. If there is no overarching structure or theory that confers meaning on life, no normative pattern or model to which life must conform, then a meaningful life is meaningless. It is true we can create a life that fulfils what we want in a sense, but this does not explain what is the meaning of life, or why we believe any of the beliefs we hold. Is right and wrong and evil just an invention, is suffering meaningless. Is there any objective reason why we should live, is living any more valuable then dying. I believe the evidence that we have universal concepts and ideas is the key to leading us in to the direction of the meaning of life.

If that vast blank emptiness, aptly named “Space” is all the home we have, then our journey, a journey out of nothing and towards nothing, risks appearing futile, as void of significance as the ultimate void that spawned us and will eventually swallow us up.