The Identity of Meaning - 04

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

Power of Implication

     The linkage, then, of one fully recognized fact to the identity of another is an exploitation of the relative powers contained in each. In so linking the implications of facts to one another, we achieve a highly mobile process that we know on the intellectual level as thinking. On this basis I must describe thinking as a moving from the acknowledgment of one identity to further assessments, prescribed and directed by the relative energy of the identity already recognized.
 
       Thus our thoughts insist on conceiving themselves, as soon as the location of our interest has determined the theme. Once before I have touched on this peculiar insistence of things made by man for taking their fate in their own hands and permitting us to see in our products not invention, but only discovery. Whatever we begin to validly conceive or make is contained already in its potential nature as part of the condition of worldly being, and is well able to direct us by its demands. Our most fruitful activity in thinking and making is bound to insight and recognition, not to a willful burst of egotism.

Potential Meaning 

      The potential being of all our concepts and works must, however, be recognized in its difference from an existence in perceivable reality. For the potential is not its realization in the actual until potentiality is turned to fulfill its implied assignment. In the potential, then, is the contributive power to be relatively involved that we find included in the identity of all things. These, from their own actuality, may be extended to seize the relative endowment of another equally real existence and enter a union with it. The resulting compound would possess the sovereignty of the actual and be endowed in its turn with ability to extend relative energy in the direction of a still further independent identity.
 
     Evidently the human being, too, is self-contained in a unit of meaning that, in the absoluteness of identity, possesses gifts of relative implication in the ability to recognize and conceive intellectually and to make physically.
 
     A number of disks, designed to rotate around their axes, and a box-like framework or structure each own the properties of their identity, including the potential relative functions of wheel and chassis. But the acknowledged identities, with their recognized relative implications, do not in themselves constitute a carriage.
 
     The powers of intelligent insight and physical making, contained in the identity of man, are extended as a contribution that renders the potential actual. Now in its own right this offers the relative powers that its new compound identity possesses to allow further speculation in the direction, for instance, of motorization and diverse transport services.
 
     Intellectual insight and the will and capacity for work based on that insight are the contribution which man is empowered to make to the contribution already offered by his environment. Wheels and chassis as a carriage are not a heap of accumulated junk. They are the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, greater to the precise extent of human collaboration in terms of wisdom and work.

The Human Potential for God

     Insight and thinking, as well as physical making, are among the relative abilities included in the essence of the human being. But so are faith and believing. If we accept the existence of God, we give recognition to an inexplicable presence, to a being whom we understand to surpass all comprehensible limits, whose content is “meaning in the infinite.” The capacity for rational thought is no avenue to God, unless its logic compels the insight that faith and believing are fitting for those to whom it is not given to know.
 
     Instead of the light to see, there is the will to believe and, because willing is an act of sovereignty, surrender in faith does not diminish the human stature. By approaching God as His identity and our inability to understand requires, namely in faith, we are not submitting to some sort of tyranny, but on the contrary, exercising the prerogative to give or withhold ourselves.
 
     As no gift is reduced or altered by the change of hands from giver to receiver, so the gift of ourselves to the majesty of God suffers no reduction in meaning. And its unique identity remains intact, for we must possess as property what we offer as a gift.
 
     In the act of faith we hold the strength to find function and purpose in the void. This emptiness would cancel all meaning beyond the limits of humanly possible knowledge if we were not fashioned to relate meaningfully to the inexplicable, by the will to believe where the insight to know is withheld.
 
     And so it appears that, by way of faith, we are committed, in a catechismic sense, to the doing of good and the surrender to God’s will. For we cannot, in all the essence of realism, ignore our gift to believe, where we meet cause to make use of it.