Meaning Construed or Meaning by Storm

He asked himself the question of how meaning occurs from so many different angles; where exactly in the mind does it arise and just how can it be arrived at? How do our realms of context determine the meanings we ascribe?...
For Husserl, the meaning of an object lied solely in one’s judgement upon it; though perception shaped and determined the possibilities for the kinds of meaning we could come to possess...the ultimate meaning we settled upon occurred in one’s judgement of an object. This notion that the meaning of something lies completely in how the individual construes it stems all the way back to Socrates-the idea that, “You are what I make you to be”. This idea has bothered me for a variety of reasons, and as I look over the scribbling lining the pages of notes I’ve taken over the past year I realize the extent to which this idea has plagued me and plunged me into the ground, a shrunken human standing under a daunting night sky, upon realizing how unbearably heavy the weight of freedom becomes upon coming to an awareness of your own ability to paint things as you please, for ones line of thinking when pushed in this direction will lead them to the ultimate conclusion that at the end of the deduction there can lie nothing more than the unsolvable and overwhelming responsibility of having to choose for one’s self how he is to interpret the things closest to him. With regard to the ones we love, this possibility for freedom and at times unbearable responsibility can become rather tragically unnerving and profoundly unsettling.

She was a ship with cracked anchors and peeling paint..rickety old floor boards and ripped sails when I saw her after a month that one night in the winter-but plagued with the belief that how one relates oneself to such a sight is completely contingent upon their own subjectivity, I become rather filled with torment and guilt for settling upon the conclusion of her sight that had pushed me away and the inevitable next thought; that I could no longer stay. For I didn’t have to leave her behind, when perhaps all that was needed was simply an adjustment to my eyes-for it was always in every aspect entirely mine; in changing my mind I could spare her the pain of me leaving again and even allow myself to be happy with everything I already had surrounding me. Determining the perspective on the world outside was always simply a matter of adjusting the blinds.

I toyed with the notion in my writing previously of the oscillation that occurs upon stepping upon deck of an old ship that one has spent many years growing acquainted with, and the possibilities for interpreting the sights and sounds that accompany a life spent captaining her. The world of intelligibility as Derrida would say, represents the universe of possible meanings attached to an object for a specific individual. The realm of meaning becomes more and more pregnant the older we grow and the more we learn; or the direction we learn in you might say. The context within which we acquire knowledge and impregnate our thinking, determines the thoughts which we ascribe to sights around us. To a sailor, a ripped sail would pale in comparison to a brand new one without any tares or flaws; simply for the reason that it would perform its task more sufficiently (presumably, though I am not a sailor). So then, if one is a sailor or simply a pragmatist, very little else matters about an object than how it will function with regard to performing its duty in a specific context of interest. Much about the way mates were chosen in the olden days was pragmatic-when I say the olden days you may fill in the blank of what I mean, whether it was the fifties or the eighteen hundreds; men chose pretty brides and women were paired with those working men who could provide. Perhaps we can’t enter into that sort of talk without making a nod towards the findings of evolutionary psychology; for is the picture they paint not of an entire race filled with pragmatists? A pragmatist species humans are, not unlike all other animals with respect to why we see things the way we do. Value determined pragmatically given our biology. But, we’re a perverse creation; with motives unknowable even to ourselves, thus the value we ascribe to given objects and actions is most of the time unknown to even our deepest levels of consciousness.

Thus, meaning is much more complicated than such sciences wish to admit; and I do believe that acquiring meaning in life is perhaps the most primordial drive for all of us. Frankl’s will-to-meaning merely re-iterated and simplified what so many had already said in order to use philosophy for therapeutic purposes and for that he was a genius. To have meaning in one’s life-what a perplexingly simple statement that never fails to leave one twisted in knots if they actually begin to consider what the word meaning means to their life; and if this line of reasoning is followed and hatched out to the bitter end then it seems difficult to understand how or why happiness tied to temporal things in life can ever seem justified. What do I mean?...simply that I am spiteful towards the ones who still see value in nightly affairs that ask for the same enthusiasm for the exact same conversations and jokes over and over and over again; and in that moment of anger towards empty chatter and the void of unintelligibility that I often find myself trapped within, I recognize that my spite is, to some extent a result of envy. Towards those who never question attaching positive meanings to themselves; who wilfully and gleefully jumped at the opportunity to become something determined, rather than avoid ever becoming anything in particular by slavishly obeying some strange fear of losing out on what may lay down one road upon pursuing one specifically. I pity those who I envy, for they seem simple to the condescending cynic in me; yet another one of the paradoxes within my subjectivity that never fails to baffle me into a state of annoyance with my lack of self understanding. My general resentment towards existence is surely nothing more than a result of feeling like a lone soldier consenting to undertaking a battle of thought that necessarily consents to a pointless struggle of ceaseless defeat the moment he turns his stare towards the glare of the burning sun. Staring at the sun will make one blind when looking around at all that surrounds his social affairs. But, there lies little difference in he who thinks too much and he who does something a lot of his time-one finds meaning in his affairs while the other searches for it somewhere; hopes for it to come falling from the sky, but knows with all his knowledge that such a day will never come.

Kierkegaard’s perpetual becoming towards the infinite, and grounding one’s self in uncertainty elicited the very problem that ultimate meaning could never be attained in life-existence was an endless string of overcoming and losing; trivial victories and arbitrary defeats that amounted to only a fleeting, momentary possession of an illusive brand of happiness that could never actually be attained in the strong sense. Happiness is unlike a graspable object, but like children (as so many have said) we long to grasp everything in our hands, and need to in order to render it intelligible to us. In paradox he posited truth; a resolution in the very fact that there wasn’t one; in uncertainty and need he found his guiding light, which was the acceptance that he would always remain blind and grounded in finite darkness. But in my opinion, Soren was nothing more than a closet nihilist dressed in Christian clothes; filled with the contradiction of the need for the eternal while perpetually grounded in the realm of the temporal. Perpetually conflicted and burning with a need to make sense of everything; yet always in acceptance of a life that offered nothing more than uncertainty. To him, meaning then, with regard to important matters such as love and the infinite relation to God could never simply be construed as we wished for them to be-so we weren’t in a position to control or shape the manner in which we related or determined the meaning of the various objects which were important to us. This idea about meaning overtaking us or coming to us, or sheathing us in a certain kind of shadow beyond our control is precisely the opposite of having complete freedom in choosing how to interpret our lives. This idea appeals to me for it relieves the sense of individual responsibility; though again, this idea of meaning happening to us strikes me as a question that sought a solution and arrived at a truth by allowing matters to be simplified too narrow-mindedly. Meaning finds us and overtakes us; we are thus, free’d from the torment and able to go about our business happily; too easy. We become free’d from the anxiety that accompanies accepting the necessity of uncertainty if we are at our core, a bottomless insatiable void of indescribable syntheses, by embracing openly an inexpressible form by allowing a storm to pour down on ourselves, the individual removes the power from his own hands and places it in the hands of something bigger than himself. For those who do not believe in God, we are left waiting for a storm to come sweeping in, to flood the streets and knock us off our feet; we long to struggle and gasp for air-and in this journey under water we could recognize that here, lies our possession of meaning; though we know not where the waters will lead us, we at least momentarily may recognize the return of meaning to us; one that is free from our determinations and therefore we become free from our anxiety of responsibility and guilt upon placing the power to shape meaning in our own tiny hands.

In that recognition, in our grasping of something, such as a lover, in our determining of them in that moment of recognition which posits the return of meaning to our lives we seemingly lose a little of what we inexpressible embodied prior to placing a frame upon her, or it. Perpetual uncertainty; to embrace her with open arms, this kind of openness is the state which we long to return to. In an unknown, indescribable land in a storm of the likes which we have never known.

Back to what I was saying...to an artist, there lies perfection in imperfection-but anyone attuned to the sensations associated with art knows that there lies no objective way of interpreting a sight-and that those who prefer art which is as easy to understand as an instruction manual will miss out on the richest kinds of meanings that man can experience; such meanings as I have argued in the past can only ever be intuitively embodied and thus never adequately expressed even in our inner monologues. To an artist then, it becomes impossible to ever settle upon one assessment of a sight; for all realms of possible interpretation perpetually leave the door open-thus remain open to an infinite world of possible interpretations; and she, as I saw her, was a painting that refused to allow a frame to be placed upon her so to allow for determination to conclude her, and bring to me that unity I longed for and needed to possess in order to feel a sense of closure on the matter. A need for results gone begging down the dirty streets of uncertainty; she could never mean anything clearly enough to me-for the moment I had moved towards drawing a conclusion via the negation of certain possibilities she would surprise me by saying something so simply sweet. The moment I would move towards affirming something sensitive or soft about her there would be an unconsidered term introduced into the derivation that rendered everything else I had a thought a contradiction and therefore invalid.

So here lies the synthesis of the two schools of thought; in the form of a very unclear synthesis which considers the truth of our ability to construe objects and people in a certain way; for our judgements upon objects most certainly determine the meaning which various objects take on in our lives; though perception has a way of determining the kinds of judgements we ascend towards. To re-word this, in order to render the entire solution more sensible, let us say that perception packs a greater punch than our judgements are capable of expressing in words. Thus, there can be certainty with regard to simple matters, but with regard to love, we must wait in uncertainty and attempt to remain in wait for as long as we can in order to avoid ascending to previous kinds of judgments, for in doing so we allow ourselves to remain open to something greater than our mind’s are capable of understanding and inevitably tarnishing. To remain aware of our mind’s tugging at the sleeve of arriving at a determined meaning in order to remain more open to what can sheathe us in a more profound, inexpressible kind of light.