On Being and Meaning

The aim of philosophical knowledge certainly does not consist in the knowledge of being, in a reflection of reality in the mind of the person who knows. Its aim is the knowledge of truth, the discovery of meaning, its purpose is to give an intelligible sense to reality. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, is not passive reflection, it is an active break-through, it is victory in the conflict with the meaninglessness of world reality. What I want to know is not reality but the truth about it, and I can recognize this truth only because there is in me myself, in the knowing subject, a source of truth, and union with truth is a possibility. The fact that there is in front of me a writing-table and I am writing with a pen on paper is not truth. It is something received by the senses and a statement of fact. The problem of truth is already posed in my writing. There is no truth of any sort of object; truth is only in the subject.

  [Nicolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & The End, Harper Torchbook, 1957, p. 42]

Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher usually grouped with Christian existentialists. I got to know him in the 1950s. He is also sometimes called the philosopher of creativeness. In the following sixty some odd years, I’ve never had occasion to question his intuition. All harmony. He has this to say on the next page:

Truth is a creative act of spirit in which meaning is brought to birth. Truth stands higher than the reality which exercises compulsion upon us, higher than the “real” world. But still higher than truth is God, or to put it more truly—God is Truth.

It Becomes You to Be

The mention of Whitehead in the last post brought to mind the complementarity of being and becoming. Becoming is fashionable in our times, and being therefore sits below the salt, but the paradox is that to behold this fashionable Becoming one must be enduring. To hold these two concepts simultaneously in the mind is the easiest thing in the world. It is the experience of consciousness. But it seems to irk the intellect. Hence in the Ages of Becoming, the enduring self is also pictured as but an instance of the universal flux, and as this age peaked, William James discovered the “stream of consciousness.” That strikes a retrograde like me as a contradiction. In the Ages of Being a similar reduction of one to the other hides in the idea that Ultimate Being is pure act. We can’t have one without the other.

Being, Becoming

Western thought in the twentieth century had a love affair with motion—and a powerfully monistic leaning too. This combination produces process theologies and theories of wholeness (like David Bohm’s). The operant word becomes becoming; being is relegated to the flat-earth past. The impulse is permeating and pervasive; thus for instance consciousness becomes the stream of consciousness; I chuckle to think that we’ve even abandoned peace for the peace process.

The inner motivation for such modes of thought fascinates me. Fluxologies of this sort strike me as detectably counter-intuitive; mind you, counter-intuitive is also supposed to be deep. Sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine that I am a deterministic process, free only in the sense that an uncertainty principle introduces randomness into nature, and that my sense of being me is therefore an illusion. In this I’m not alone, of course. We all feel, think, and act like agents (some of the time, anyway), but the theories suggest that we’re in fact deluded. Therefore, it seems to me, a very strong will must be present in those people who construct monistic theories rather than yielding to intuition. Intuition teaches a self-evident dualism. It teaches that life is different in kind from inorganic matter, that we have but are not bodies, that we have but are not feelings, thoughts, and intuitions.

What is the nature of this will? This will appears, it seems to me, because the people who manifest it cannot deal with the notion that a genuine mystery is present behind reality, the very mystery that makes us who we are, the mystery that, as the Sufis say, is closer to you than your jugular vein. If a genuine agency is detected, even if only in all-too-humble us, it forces a dualistic frame on thought. This problem arises because agency cannot be derived from motion and random processes at all. This means that science can’t quite reach everything; that human lordship isn’t absolute. The presence of a humble agent logically forces us to posit a higher agency, perhaps a hierarchy of beings that, just like us, stand out from the flux and cannot be explained by it. Liberation from this knowledge, which promised such future delights in the past, produces vistas of meaninglessness now in which no one sees the ever becoming process actually land on anything concrete even long enough to order its feathers.

Our Mysterious Origins

Two kinds of instructions reach us in childhood. Put in the generic terms, one is to excel; the other is to serve the community. These are usually summed by the phrase: “Be good.” The sheer fact that we are here is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Our relationship to others is also obvious. We begin in a dependent role. Indeed, we continue to be dependent until death. What changes is that, later, we have more freedom in choosing our network of connections. If we’re lucky. We are formed by interaction on the one hand, by internal urges and needs on the other. The early advice we get is essentially correct—improve, serve. For most nothing more is needed. Life flows on hemmed in by these banks. And because our needs and mutual relations continue to the end—and societies always have a routine explanation for existence, some kind of story or ideology—something must happen to make us question the conventions. Some kind of inner urge—or external stimulus—must trigger questioning. When that happens, it can shock, or stimulate, us. We’ll be temporarily disoriented.

In life’s normal give-and-take, where the bumps and jostles stay within a well-accustomed range—and pleasures and joys are customary too—nothing presents itself to make us question our place and function. But when the cake of custom cracks, tragedy strikes, troubles arise, strange ecstasies (however brought about) make us lose our balance, then we also temporarily lose our sense of place. The degree of disturbance will suggest the degree to which we’ll question our place. Individual sensitivities will either magnify or minimize the shocks. Shocks lead to learning. With time we include more and more of reality into our compass. We expand our horizons, adjust our sense of alignment. But, here again, personal traits and education will lead to different outcomes.

Children exposed early to cosmic orientations—as I was, growing up in a Catholic environment—will spontaneous integrate cosmic stories. To grow is to integrate external influences with our own intuitions. We are far from blank boards on which environmental influences scribble out our fate. We take elements of the cosmologies we’re taught and integrate them (or suspend them) depending on the answers from within. If receive philosophical “objects” as children, we integrate them right alongside all the practical: it is all one to us.

Indeed, thinking about it, it’s obvious that the precise name of things is not all that important for the child. As children we learn quite early—intuitively, as it were—to handle abstractions skillfully. Concepts like God or king or good or evil rapidly come to occupy a place in a structure of relationships. Quite early in our lives we develop a clear concepts of negatives too— in the sense of “empty,” “lost,” or “gone.” All concepts have physical analogies, but we find it easy to abstract: we see the general concept of “lost” whether we have lost a shoe, glove, or a pencil. We have concepts of time long before we learn to read a clock. “Just a minute,” our mother will say. We have a clear and painful sense of waiting. Space is no more problematical: here and there, far and near.

But that which is most central to our being is deeply hidden. We never question ourselves. I still rather clearly remember my initial reaction in college to hearing the concept of “being” formally discussed. I experienced a certain surprise, mixed with bemusement. It struck me as droll that ancient wise men should have labored so hard thinking about something so obvious; and I thought it vaguely illegitimate to separate “being” from that which “was”—as if you could. I did not then realize that the dance around “being” was the late and advanced articulation of something rather more basic and fundamental. It is the problem of ultimate orientation, namely the issue of “What am I doing here?” Analyzing that simple but stark question one comes up with its opposite, Nothingness. But nothingness isn’t particularly helpful except for philosophizing. Like mathematicians, philosophers manipulate symbols using rules of logic. Philosophy tempts people with the mirage of answers. It can be difficult and complex; these difficulties and complexities more or less hide how empty the enterprise actually is unless it stays firmly anchored in experience.

Meanwhile the stark question is legitimate. It is central to grasping the human condition—even if philosophy as such—formal schemes like Kant’s for instance—cannot answer it. Not viscerally. Not at the level where we live. Only a myth can even come close to the essence of the thing. The manipulation of the labels we attach to experience resembles the operation of a kaleidoscope: we produce ever new patterns but by moving the same old colored bits of glass in a confined space; nothing really changes except the arrangement.

What is most central to our being is its meaning. Our existence, by itself, is not answer enough. So long as a consensus satisfies us, so long as our orientation is adequate for daily needs, the issue of what we’re doing here rarely arises: we’re working, resting, having fun. Life is a flow of experience, stimulus, response. We’re carried on a river of time. We have no knowledge of our origin—we woke up already floating on the river—and the terminus of our voyage is still far away. Moreover, we can easily imagine ourselves continuing on beyond our passing or, if so inclined, imagine ourselves falling into a dreamless and permanent state of sleep.

Nor does this condition, even once it’s realized, exercise people excessively unless something radical is also present, arising from within. If our condition is reasonably comfortable—or can be imagined to improve—we accept traditional wisdom, shy from the seemingly hopeless effort to tackle the problem. We say, “Well, that’s the way things are.” Half of our nature is pragmatic, straight-forward, practical, and sensible. We optimize. Part of optimization is not to bother reinventing wheels. We learn in childhood to accept explanations from our elders—and traditional wisdom is exactly that. We don’t relish becoming engineers, plumbers, or seamstresses when the electricity fails, a pipe bursts, or something tears. First we seek our comfort and adaptation at least cost. Next we rouse ourselves to organize fixes to things that really go wrong. Even when things become quite hopeless, the vast majority of humankind apparently chooses dumb endurance in the face of adversity—exactly as animals do—swamped by that half of our nature which is nature. We hang in there, we hunker down. We have to wander a long ways, and already highly sensitized, before we ever even reach the borderzone.