Abstract

Philosophy can be characterized as the quest for certainty or the quest for meaning. The quest for certainty is the search for unquestionable grounds and means for guaranteeing assertions about our world. The quest for meaning is the attempt to understand how we appropriate and interpret meaning in our lives. The quest for certainty arises in the seventeenth century, within the context of Platonic thought, Medieval Scholasticism, Renaissance Skepticism, new science, and the development of modern philosophy. ;Nietzsche attempts to set aside the quest for certainty in favor of the quest for meaning. Nietzsche argues that there is no ultimate ground for truth and certainty, focusing instead on questions of meaning and value. Nietzsche portrays "philosophy of the future" as the experimental construction of a world view through radical metaphoricity, the "artistic" creation of a model for re-envisioning and refashioning meaning in the world. ;Heidegger's own "philosophy of the future" is captured in the terms "meditation" and "thinking." Heidegger's philosophy focuses on the event of meaning and the horizon and thrownness of Dasein, but neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche give us a "method" for the quest for meaning. This task is left to others, like Gadamer, who describes the tension of poetic understanding as both carrier of tradition and non-representational enactment of truth. ;The quest for meaning has a twofold character: the exploratory character of creating meaning and the event nature of the experience of meaning. The quest for meaning can be characterized as "self-conscious myth," where myth means the instantiation and appropriation of meanings in a fashion that involves the self-conscious awareness of all meaning as mythic. This alternative approach places the appropriation of meaning prior to justifications. The approach suggested by Nietzsche and Heidegger revives the sense of philosophy as an exploration and as an experience of vital meaning. Philosophy as the quest for meaning plays an important role in our lives and remains prior to any necessarily domain limited quest for certainty