The question of meaning is the price we pay for self-consciousness. The question does not arise as long as we are unself-consciously and fully engaged in the act of living, that is, when we take the world for granted. We do not ask whether a movie, career, or love affair has "meaning" as long as we are fully involved in the moment and our expectations and actions flow unimpeded, guided by the sure and secondary instincts of cultural myths. Our natural state is one of faith rather than belief. For most of us, the question of meaning never arises; we never reach the point of self- consciously asking, "What does life mean?" Most of us, most of the time, live comfortably and unself-consciously following our cultural instincts (this is faith, not belief).
Whereas meaning has often been understood to be related to purpose or correspondence, William James and postmodernists encourage us to ask the pragmatic, functional question of meaning: What does raising the question of meaning "do"? What is its function? What motive or interest do we seek to satisfy when we ask "Why"? Beyond the very different motives for each of the meaning strategies we've examined, the common trait is a fundamental dissatisfaction with the ways things are. Whether the source of this dissatisfaction is inherent in human nature or signals a failure of culture is less important than the recognition that the question of meaning happens when we suddenly STOP, look around, and say to ourselves, "Something's wrong here!" One's unimpeded, unself-conscious journey through life (that happy, drunken life that Tolstoy fondly remembered having lived before the why and what for questions became insistent) is being challenged and confronted in a way that leaves one unsatisfied and wanting.
Whenever our journey through life is impeded, that is, whenever we suddenly stop living unself-consciously because of death or cultural differences, wonder, or a thousand other reasons and frustrations, a separation occurs. We suddenly step back and become self-conscious. We become an outsider or spectator in a way that signals our ability to think about our circumstances. We begin to ask "Why?" In asking why, the myth becomes visible, the acceptance of "is" is challenged by "ought" or "could be," the transitory is questioned by the eternal and we compare the world as we find it to the world we imagine or create. Animals never ask these questions, nor—one imagines—do people living in primitive, isolated cultures. Because humans live in a symbolic as well as a physical world, stepping back in a way that makes us self-conscious—and paradoxically an object of our own thought—may be inevitable. Both the privilege and burden of transcendence are part of our inheritance as human beings.
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