The Identity of Meaning - 01

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

  The Need for Meaning 

     In the course of a daily increasing span of life, events and concepts accumulate to reach gradually a degree of confused complication that becomes unmanageable in its ever waxing quantity. The will to search for a basic principle which endows with meaning the enterprise of life, and all that it entails on the human scale, is at once natural and inevitable.

     These pages intend to examine the condition of meaning, in the hope of excavating a foundation upon which we may think and act –  not perhaps with certainty but with, however, a resolution wholly unlike the uncommitted indecision that characterizes the waste of futility.

     From the recognition that we are able to discern meaning in nothing which does not in some manner take effect upon us, we obtain a first indication of a feasible direction in which we may pursue our search.

     Thus we have some reason to at least suspect that the particular way in which one thing makes its impact upon another contains what meaning is to be found, not in either one, but in the relation of each to the other. Consequently, we quite reasonably arrive at units of meaning of variable complexity, which must seek escape from futility in borrowing a reason for their existence by relating to yet further units.

     In this process of continuing and enlarging relationships, the point is ultimately reached where this interpenetration of related meanings is contained in one vast system which comprises all available associations and which, now in its turn, must find a source which will contribute meaning. Such a contribution can no longer be contained within the natural world and would have to be the prerogative of an infinite, almighty, and divine existence.

     Meaning, however, on the level of divinity, is totally incomprehensible to the mind of man. And if this investigation is to continue at all, I must assume that meaning in the lives of human beings takes its place in the natural world and may be understood -- within this deliberate reduction to the measure of man –  by the natural powers at our disposal.

     If that assumption be a violation of the essential character of meaning, and if I possibly reduce something to my own scale which, in fact, bears no reduction at all, I would yet be forced to take upon myself the risk of committing such an error. For the realization that, without so risking, I should be deprived of my theme altogether, appears to justify that I confine the problem to humanly manageable proportions, because it does exist validly and perceivably in the earthbound environment of humanity.


Relative or Absolute? 

     As long as we look upon the substance of meaning as the result of the associations among all things, we find that these relationships will outdistance us to the point where human intelligence can simply not follow. It is hence necessary to at least make the attempt to discover meaning not in the indebtedness of one thing to the other, but in a more sovereign sense which I should like to name “meaning in the absolute.” – The expression “absolute” here is not an identification of divinity. Its intended interpretation is antonymous to the word “relative,” and therefore close to the Latin root “absolutus.”

     For, in spite of the fact that we have observed that experience with meaning tends to be limited to the effects that invade our lives from the outside, or more briefly, tends to be “meaning in the relative,” each of these sources of relating influences does have a character and quality particularly its own. Quite independent from any ties with its partner in relative meaning, it does have identity, and we shall have to ascertain whether this contains such significance in its own right that we obtain indeed meaning in an absolute sense.