An Idea, Life & Tech Blog

Church yesterday, the preacher had 4 questions in the bulliten, 3/4 were “What does it mean that…” So I got thinking, what is being asked of us, and is this a common mental pathway for people to think about?

After theological, philosophical & art-history studies, I can’t help but have the word ‘hermeneutics’ come to mind whenever I consider ‘meaning’. But for most people, they think they’re being deep about art when they ask ‘what did the author/artist mean?” Truly, they’re just using a very, very, very, vague term to mask their ignorance.

There’s at least 4 ways people use the word “meaning.” I’ll use the example of marriage.
1) Material worth. This is the most basic, and it might not directly apply to marriage, but it applies to the gold ring.. What does gold mean? It means $. (We’ll get to the symbolism later).
2) Material consequences: The material consequences of marriage is that my wife and I live in the same home, fix meals together, and share finances.
3) Personal/Behavioral Intent: This is likely the most common. People always wonder what someone was thinking, or what they were attempting to do/communicate. The other is always hidden, mysterious to some people. For my example of marriage, the intention behind marriage is that we love each other, and are better together than apart.
4) Symbolic meanings. This is the realm of non-materiality. In Christianity, marriage is a picturing of Christ and the church, enacting a truth. Likewise, the ‘ring’ means all that fluffy stuff preachers talk about.. never-ending (just like marriage), etc..

Material consequences provide a much wider behavioral base than does symbolism. For instance, I have no classes on Tuesday mornings. There is a church event this Tuesday morning. Does this “mean” that I should attend/help at this event? That “meaning” is one of material consequence. That I *should* because “I’m on this planet to advance the church” is purposive, getting closer to symbolic, but not quite. The closest Christianity has of the symbolic interacting with our schedules is that Christ rose on Sunday, and we remember his ressurection on every Sunday. There’s a connection, but it is not produced by any material force (or directly by any social institution like work), but by human ability to remember, and associate.
Thanks to Western culture being heavily individual, as well as scientific, people are confused about meaning, but they seek it out desperately. An inconsequential life is “the worst thing ever” for narcissists. But even for the non-narcissists, we don’t have much speak about the symbolic worth/meaning/importance of our daily lives.
The funny thing about symbolism, is how they are built, and who places them. In literature, the author creates them. In life, it is assumed God creates them. People can, as traditions form symbols, but individuals can also for symbols, though with less consequence/communal aspects.
Within Christianity, the body-as-dwelling-place-of-the-Holy-Spirit does have meaning, both symbolically (that as God is with us now, that we will be with Him later) and consequentially (don’t act unbecoming of God). This pairing of a belief (body=dwelling of Spirit) to symbolic meaning is often left out of discussions, since symbolism isn’t pragratism. We’re a heavy ‘do’ culture, and symbols don’t ‘do’ much. What they can do, we don’t realize, leave out, and are left wandering in search of: symbolism provides a guide for our behaviors and interests. Beliefs don’t have the affective nature of meanings/symbolism. Beliefs seem to be the first filtering of the cold facts of this world. Meanings aren’t about cold facts as much as they are built from beliefs, and reinforce beliefs. Believing Jesus will return to end the world tonight will have material consequence on my behavior. But that sounds kind of random. But if I believed Jesus was returning on August 9th, 2010 because the date was “8/9/10′, now we’re talking symbols (albeit with very, very, poor correspondence of meaning to orthodox/historical Christian beliefs).
Symbolism seems to only exist in various sentimentalism, religion, and literature, be it futuristic/speculative (sci-fi), or of the ‘epic’ variety (Homer, CS Lewis, etc). With no significant meaning-structure in place in Western culture, we all end up wanting our lives to ‘fit just so’ like in a movie-plot, where meanings are tight, and purposes are clear. The non-existence/fuzziness/fracturing of meanings in this world are somewhere between sad, ridiculous and amazing. I’m sure it’s much clearer than we make it out to be, and the clarity does seem to come when we start with the belief that we’re all in avoidance-of-meaning routines.

Evidence: The Moon. The Full Moon.
Not exactly as full or lively as this pic I get on my weather status/forecast:

The dominant Western perspective on idealism is likely a static end. I note within me and my desire for the ideal idyllic end, an imagined, Hume-ian, low-vivacity, highly ordered system of statics, or even worse, a singular static.

I suppose plenty of this is thanks to a history of images and heroism: we are nearly trained by history to look for a singular hero, and for the final state of that hero to be static. Novels end happily, leaving to our imagination only the last scene, pictures display a static ideal.. all display a type of rest from work, where work is the battle fought actively against entropic forces, for the ideal state. Work and activity is banished, since they are direct consequences of an evil.

But to contrast this, what would a non-singular, non-static idyllic world be?

First, an idyllic world: This world is good (without evil or pain). There is an end of value-judgments between and regarding all elements. There is no need for improvement, though it could be possible to display the good (whatever it might be). The need/availability of activity is still to be determined.

Second, a non-singular world: A multiplicity of distributed good is either a heirarchical structure (static) of the elements, or an actively re-coupling, restructuring of the elements, across an eternity of time, going through all the permutations. The ‘good’ here, is displayed over time, occuring between elements.

Third, a dynamic, non-static world: As mentioned, if there is to be a distributed good, there almost certainly will involve a dynamism of the elements. Activity is not the realm of evil or against-evil, but the redisplay of the good inherent. This could involve development and growth, but likely the final-state will be reached.
Here we find a disparity between the nature of terms ‘final’ ’state’ and the ‘change’ involved in growth. Taking a systemic approach, the system of elements can continually re-shuffle, expressing and exchanging between each other (growth), while the system itself remains stable.

As an aside, I fear here my number-theory will fail: that a sufficiently large number of elements, with an exponentially high number of permutations or relations will still fail to reach an infinity of time (eternity). Taking the inverse approach, an infinity divided out will still reveal an infinity.

To challenge my third point again, there are at least 3 types of progress I’ve noticed: a basic, anti-entropic form, an internal building-inward, and an external building-upward towards a transcendent goal. These seem to appear on a continuum of responsibility from a Maslow-like ‘basic self’, ‘optional self’, through self-beyond-self/self-projected-onto-the-other; a feeling responsibility over the external world.
This first kind will not apply in a final good state. The second may; and the third certainly sounds backwards: the final-state having a goal? Usually we consider goals-completed as final-states. Odd.

I’m not sure where this goes, but it was an interesting study mid-day..