[This post is the fourth in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]
Meaning is a certain sort of feeling that, when it arises in a person, arises for reasons particular to that person. I experience meaning for my reasons and you experience meaning for your reasons.
Consider the following. Four men are riding in a car. They pass a tree. For the first man, the tree holds no particular meaning. He glances at it, it registers as a tree, and that’s that. For the second man in the car, it holds some poignant meaning, as it is the tree in which he carved his initials as a boy and reminds him of a time when his loving parents were still alive. For him, it is an object of love and nostalgia: that’s why the feeling of meaning wells up in him. For the third man, it has some meaning, because its bark is known to cure certain rashes and he is a student of natural treatments. For him, it is an object of scientific interest and provides a small but palpable feeling of meaning. For the fourth man, the driver, it produces a powerful feeling of meaning. He has been contemplating suicide and, in his nightmares, he has seen himself driving his car into exactly such a tree. For him, it is an object of fear and awful attraction. Therefore, so potent and dramatic a feeling arises in him that he almost drives the car into that tree.
The tree has no intrinsic meaning. But three of these men find it meaningful, for their particular reasons.
Or consider the following. Four women are knitting. The first finds knitting meaningful because it is the one activity where her husband doesn’t intrude, criticize, or lay down the law. For her, it is a sanctuary. The second woman finds knitting meaningful because she associates it with an ordered universe in which leaves turn color in the autumn, children obey, men plow, and women knit. For her, it is a satisfying emblem of the way her life knits together. The third woman finds knitting meaningful because it has a social and political valence: it represents the choice she is making to value “women’s work” over “patriarchal gallery art.” For her, it is an activist stance. The fourth, ordered by her husband to knit with these women because their husbands are his bosses, finds their gossip intolerable, the knitting boring, and her presence demeaning. For her, knitting is a meaningless activity and these hours spent knitting a horror.
Knitting has no intrinsic meaning. But three of these women find it meaningful, and for very different reasons. And the fourth could not find it less meaningful. In fact, knitting with these women contributes to her despair and her feeling that life is meaningless. And, for her, life is indeed meaningless, because nothing she does or is allowed to do is generating the feeling of meaning. If she could do what she loved to do—if she knew what that was—isn’t it likely that meaning would suddenly appear?
In each of these cases we are dealing with the psychology of individuals. We are dealing with the way a person organizes her self-image, incorporates cultural norms, negotiates inner conflicts, manifests her instincts and her reason, observes herself and modulates her personae, and so on. We are dealing with the way a Frenchman is a Frenchman, an addict is an addict, a princess is a princess, and a corporate raider is a corporate raider. We are dealing with desires and defenses, love and indifference, heroism and herd mentality. That someone experiences something as meaningful and that someone else fails to experience that very same thing as meaningful has to do with their inner reality, not the nature of the something.
The one woman, a traditionalist, knits because it is congruent with her vision of an ordered life where husbands command and women serve. The other woman, a feminist, knits because knitting is a political activity meant to demonstrate that not only man-made art in galleries is art. Both women find knitting meaningful—and for completely different reasons. In fact, their reasons reside at opposite ends of a political continuum. They are very much not the same person. But they both find the same activity meaningful. Meaning makes strange bedfellows!
And were they to change their mind about the value of knitting, it would likewise be for personal, and for very likely different, reasons. The feminist might stop valuing knitting if her paintings, which so far had not been wanted by galleries, suddenly became hot commodities in the art world. The traditionalist might stop valuing knitting if her husband announced, “Lots of men have taken up knitting.” We assign values for our own reasons; and, likewise, when we shift and change our values, we do so for our own particular reasons. Something is meaningful to us or not meaningful to us according to who we are right now, at this split second. Meaning is completely located in personal time.
Meaning is a feeling arising for subjective psychological reasons. Imagine that something you currently considered meaningful suddenly “lost its meaning.” What might precipitate such an event? Can you guess at what reasons might precipitate what would likely feel like a meaning crisis? Might a friendship lose its meaning because of a festering conflict? Might writing your novel lose its meaning the less and less you liked it? Might maintaining your diet lose its meaning on a day when cravings struck like thunderbolts? Meaning is a feeling that arises for reasons and that likewise leaves for reasons. Picture a sparrow or a hummingbird. It alights on a branch, stays a moment, and leaves. The bird has its reasons and so does the experience of meaning.
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READ PART ONE HERE: Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning Is Wrong: The Even Harder Problem
READ PART TWO: On Craving the Feeling of Meaning
READ PART THREE: Why ‘Is Life Meaningful?’ Is the Wrong Question
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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