On Meaning (or the Lack Thereof)

I am becoming more comfortable with the notion that there is no meaning as we have traditionally thought about it—nothing out there in the universe that explains everything, no Platonic forms waiting to be discovered or emulated or admired. Rather, I’m beginning to think that what we call meaning is an artifact of human activity, more like a toaster or a wristwatch than anything a priori.

Meaning is something we create in our minds when we order and delineate relationships between things. This is why meaning is so seemingly all-encompassing, why a coyote can simultaneously manifest as a pest and a species, a vital member of an ecosystem and a trickster god.

This doesn’t make meaning any less real, of course; a car or a candle are no less real than a rock or a tree for having been made by people. Meaning is simply, like a painting or a ceiling tile, plastic. It must be approached with its own set of values, and the meaning that we ascribe to natural objects must be understood for what it is, an artifact of the human mind working on those objects and not some kind of discovered ultimate judgment. If anything, this requires us to be more respectful of what we encounter in the world, as the trees and the stars and the coyotes defy meaning since they occupy themselves; they exist beyond our limited attempts at creation and categorization.

This is maybe also why we get frustrated when we try to depict nature in art, and why for so many years memesis was so important to art, and in the same way that categorization and description are important to science. But science (mostly) comes to terms with its limitations: it can describe in a somewhat limited way, but it cannot answer the questions of human values and certainly cannot sum up the meaning of an otter or a perch. That, perhaps, is why scientists and artists are more likely to be advocates for conservation: they confront the thing itself. Business interests and industries see the meaning of a forest entirely summed up in its board feet of lumber and a fishery equated only with the market value of its catch. If we level with ourselves about the limits of meaning-creation, we can no longer think this way. We must accept that the sovereignty of the thing does not belong to us but to the thing itself (interpolating Walker Percy).

Maybe this is why Kant’s categories seem overly complex to me, a Ptolemaic attempt to keep the human soul at the center of a universe as a conduit of that universe’s inherent meaning. When we go beyond meaning, we approach what the Buddhists call interbeing, as the hardest part of all this is the idea that the human herself is also not the subject of meaning—not an artifact of human mental activity—but an object of being, a sovereign thing whose existence, like a mossy boulder or an errant daisy, extends beyond meaning alone.

I realize I am putting values upside-down here, but then, that’s the point. Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values fails, ultimately, because it still clings to the idea of values, which are themselves derived from human meaning. We don’t need a transvaluation of values but a transition from values to existence; values flow from, are artifacts of, sovereign existence.

I suppose this makes me an existentialist of a sort, but I do not think essence proceeds from existence because I do not believe in essence as such. “Essence,” too, is a form of meaning, a Platonic notion that attempts to sidestep the particularities of the thing. It is just another name for categorization: “the essence of a human” is simply a delineation of what we say categorizes a human as a result of whatever methods we apply: unique, soul-bearing life; homo sapiens sapiens; uppity ape.

–Lael Ewy

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