The Identity of Meaning - 03

We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959.        (Third of six sections)

Creation and Creator

     If I am to maintain my point of view regarding the autonomous character in the meaning of all things, then I am in consequence forced to acknowledge the personal separateness of human existence from the identity of God.
 
     The temptation may be great to toy with the sound of words, to say that the concept of creature and creation cannot be understood in any other way than in forever dependent relation to the Creator.
 
     These words, however, play a misleading game, and may move the more arrogant among us to state in addition that the Creator does not meaningfully exist, unless it be in relation to creature and creation. In this curious fashion God would be reduced to a level of being where He depended on our existence for meaning in His. I am undecided whether this would be a mere error or the beginning of blasphemy.
 
      It is my conviction that, when God completed all He has made, the navel cord between Him and us was severed, when we were given volition and choice – in effect – a self-contained identity.
 
     He has set us free, and correspondingly freed his own identity from ours. He is creator by the nature of His omnipotence – the authority to do all things – not because He has made a world and put us in it. Had He never made us, His creator identity would have suffered no reduction from the omission, as it received no increase from the act.


To Relate Meaning

     The preoccupation with meaning in an absolute sense is in no way intended to diminish or deny the importance of the relative coexistence which we observe in the interaction of innumerable things. We are now, however, aware that each thing must contain its meaning within its own identity before it can relate meaningfully to another equally qualified.
 
     I should like to state that meaning in the absolute is the presupposed condition upon which meaning in the relative must rest. And, by the same token, it should be added that the relative is the vehicle by which absolutes relate their meaning to each other.
 
 
     So far this investigation has not yet revealed the very typical activity which is required if one thing is to involve itself relatively with another. To study the act which extends the meaning of one identity, and makes it available to the other, is the task to which I am now most urgently put.
 
     Despite an unchangeable character founded in identity, it does seem that, included within the integrity of each thing, there is a flexibility of potential functional activity. This participates in the overriding nature of its meaning and is able to extend that meaning of total oneness in many directions, and engage it in diverse forms of coexistence.
 
     Maybe it is of some value here – or at any rate, expedient – to resort to exemplification in order to demonstrate the act of relative functioning.


Relations of “Four”

     Assuming any number, “4,” for instance, and giving recognition to its unshakeable character as a symbol of four exactly equal entities, we may yet consider a variety of arithmetical functions in which this value may be employed. Four can be divisor or multiplier, dividend or multiplicand, positive or negative. In this way it is varied in its relative function, but the “fourness” which identifies it is inviolable.
 
     Our knowledge of the fact “four,” however, remains incomplete if we do not recognize the relative powers that imply potential and are included in its absolute identity. “Four” owns these powers independently of whatever use we find to employ them from case to case. Therefore it is not truly possible to know an isolated fact. For, to be ignorant of the particular relative strengths included in each fact is to not know it all.
 
     Recognition of relative function allows us to examine the identity of a fact from as many sides as there are directions of potential impact upon other entities. Such close scrutiny of all facets reveals an entirety. It does not permit us to be misguided into the belief that a thing has changed identity merely because it relates its meaning in a different way to a different thing than habit is wont to perceive. Seeing from all sides is knowing all directions of potential relative extension to which an existence is empowered by virtue of being.
 
     Taking for granted, at the time, the relative powers held within the significance of each word, I was able to look upon the poem mentioned earlier as a self-sufficient unit of meaning and disown it in terms of principle, without either mention or speculation in regard to specific content. And indeed, its theme and subject matter, all-important on their own terms, have not in any way become more relevant now in this discussion.
 
     It is, however, essential to realize the complexity of every poem as a unit of meaning that comprises, as one entity, the interrelation of all single meanings that it integrates. Though I maintain that the integration of single facts is a sovereign identity, its meaning in all its oneness is of compound character.