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We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959. (Final of six sections)  Summation – The Principle of Meaning At last, I hope I have been able to clarify some aspects of the principle of meaning. I have presented my theme by discussing meaning as the content of all identities. I have done this without insistence, beyond illustrative example, upon a specified meaning belonging to a specific thought or object. And I have collected the being of all, however variedly distinguished entities, under one name – meaning – and tried to show what principle rules the nature of all things under this generalization. Here at the end I wish to summarize the conclusions that perhaps have been reached. Meaning is the content of being. This content, that has been named “meaning in the absolute,” includes the potential power to contribute its meaning to the content of another being under the term “meaning in the relative,” for which meaning in the absolute is the presupposed condition. When man has reached the limit of knowledge accessible to his mind, he can yet relate to the remaining unfathomable existence or void by faith in an omnipotent, infinitely wise and just deity. I believe that, even without a living God, the act of faith would be valid and meaningful – for faith is included in the endowment of our identity. And because we desire to know ourselves, we must experience our own power of faith, not necessarily because in faith we believe correctly, but because perceiving ourselves in the act of faith enlarges our self-knowledge. To know himself and the role of his entire being, man must use his power to relate. This is absolutely his sovereign possession and, by employing it, he gives evidence of himself to himself. God, however, all-knowing, needs no such demonstration of his creator identity. His self-knowledge of it would be complete without the test of creation. In the end I have written this paper as a personal guide in my own endeavor to distinguish and separate meaning from non-meaning, sense from non-sense. The meaning contained in our being, and in other existences, becomes perceivable to us mainly in the relation of ourselves to the environment. In such a manner, the search in these pages may, over the years in a small measure, help to reveal the content of my own identity. This seeking, rewarded at best with only partial finding, is the task of our lives. We are committed to it because insight into the nature of our identity from within is the required condition for insightfully relating to the world without. By so seeking we acknowledge ourselves, in the realization that being is the vessel which holds all the meaning we can ever hope to find. 
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 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.  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.  |
A Blog containing longer text selections from essays by Johannes, on art, philosophy, religion and the humanities, written during the course of a lifetime. 
Artists are not art historians. People who write are not all learned scholars. This can lead to “repeat originality” on most rare occasions. When we briefly share a pathway of inquiry with others, we sometimes also must share the same results.
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