Number 96 : April 1999 |
The task is seemingly vast. As authors of our own life's actions we ascribe meaning by reading our motives. We have no way of checking when the action is completed whether we correctly discern our motives or have made them up after the event. Others read our motives differently and we often see ourselves through their eyes inauthentically as a character of fiction. Tolstoy could field a hundred characters whose conflicting views of life's purpose would form the plot of the novel. Yet our task is to find a succinct meaning that is the same for everyone.
To be sure we have caught the big fish we must not only cast a semantic net over all life's variety but demonstrate that all other nets are holed. We can start by excluding such mesh as only engages with mellow moods, heightened states of consciousness or ecstasy as all conscious life must be included. On the other hand, however dire our situation, the meaning must remain valid as, for our purposes, it would be a contradiction to say life had lost its meaning. The meaning we seek must inform the values that influence everyday decisions and not be the private property of the idealist or religious believer.
So we must address the only experience of life that is common to all at all times and that is perception. Life's meaning must lie in our feelings or attitudes towards perception. Our success as a species lies in our ability to process our perceptions into information. The manner of this processing is to sort out patterns in what would otherwise be a chaotic flow of signals. The patterns may be repetitions of sense data which are classified and named or sequences and conjunctions in space and time. The more complex these patterns are the more we employ mathematics to supplement words in our construction of reality.
Yet we would not need to construct knowledge unless we related to it. Those relations range from our basic needs as consumers of reality, through the few dozen words we have for feelings, to the endless series of emotions denoted by musical compositions. Our knowledge of the world in conjunction with our wants and feelings result in those attitudes and personal choices which reveal the way we construct meaning in our individual lives. However, this method of constructing meaning breaks down at two points.
Though we process the external world we cannot classify the phenomena of our own selves. I cannot know how I might be in an hours time by analysing the pattern of my present or past thoughts, moods or behaviour. This accords with the observation of Heraclitus that "we never step in the same river twice". Our future experience is both unique and transient. Secondly, our knowledge of the world is limited. We can never be sure the patterns we formulate will either apply to phenomena as yet unobserved or are the most adequate patterning. Knowledge is most significantly limited by not knowing why any phenomena exist rather than there being none at all. If we now envisage our unpredictable feelings confronting the mystery of existence, how far this is from personal choice determining the meaning of life. That local completeness has been sheathed in encompassing mystery.
To stem the haemorrhage of meaning from life caused by this lack of certainty, this acceptance of puzzlement and powerlessness, we can take stock of the healthy balance of our resources. There is the opulence of having a finite purpose, of moving the locus of our perception round an object in the fast moving world and arresting it for our pleasure. Couple this useful skill with the freedom to range unconfined over the speculative frontier between knowledge attained and sought, confident that no theory of the linkage of everything will exhaust the existential mystery.
However, we still cannot hold life between the two connected prongs of this pincer. Because the common experience of life is perception and we can only be aware of perception in the present moment then perception must always be transient. Yet paradoxically we can never experience change in a present moment, we can only experience the plenitude of the present moment and never its waning.
So, instead of holding life with any instrument to examine its meaning, our skill and purpose must be to surf the breaking wave of the present. Our experience of this plenitude at the wave's crest is life's meaning. We can now chart its dimensions, the amplitude and depths of life's meaning.
This wave that emanates from the big existential bang carries the conundrum of its origin for ever in its continuing ability to make the wave. Just as the outer edge of the universe does not expand into space but makes space by expanding so the wave of the present does not move into future time but creates time and its contents each moment. The potential of its creativity is inexhaustible. The stretch of the wave on either side is finite yet unbounded. The consciousness of the surfers is bounded by perception of what exists but becomes infinite through the unlimited angles of perception. The wave's proportions induce a sense of wonder. We can compare our consciousness, which is less than a pinhead because a mental image has no dimensions, to the enormity of the extension and the ancient origin of the ground swell. We can relate the determinism of the surge and the reckless path of its energy to the unfathomable deeps that subtend us in which we shall inevitably drown.
The emergent property of knowing we are in the breaking wave of the present and realising its dimensions is that every which way our inclinations move (while not straying into moral trespass) has meaning. Together with a companion facing the same direction we can define that meaning without words by parallax.
Roger Farnworth
Roger : I look forward to another dose of this at Braziers. My questions relate to the last bit. I’m not sure we surf the breaking wave of the present without carrying with us the lumber of the past. That’s the only way we can make sense of the present moment. We don’t experience raw data - it’s all interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of experience. That’s why we sometimes don’t believe our eyes or ears. OK, persistently anomalous data has to be attended to - that’s how we learn new things - but we need to systematise things so that our model of the world, which we use for predictive purposes, hangs together. I’m not convinced that all your purple prose is helpful philosophically ! Your last sentence sounds good, but how does it work in practice ?
Theo