Meaning

There is no meaning beyond that created by creatures. How could there be? Meaning-making is an animalistic phenomenon, a concoction of consciousness. A tree has no desire to know the meaning of it all. And a cloud is quite content to float along without a purpose-driven life. Human beings are not so fortunate. Like a junkie incessantly seeking a high, so humanity as a whole is obsessed with meaning. Yet unlike a drug addiction, meaning-making is not necessarily a problem—so long as we are fully aware of the fictitious element in our endeavors. While there is likely no methadone for our meaning cravings, simple awareness of our need for make-believe and meaning-making actually can be celebrated as a quintessential quality of our creatureliness, one that is at once unavoidable and wonderfully distinctive: we are creators of our own worlds. World-creation is what we do essentially as people. Nihilism, the view that the universe is without inherent meaning, need not be seen as a nemesis but rather a truth-telling friend and liberator. There is freedom in seeing with eyes wide open the autobiographical nature of human nature. Like Shakespeare writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream we, too, author stories and script our very lives, infusing our worlds with meaning and purpose, our pens dripping with the ink of individuality, creativity, and a playfulness as diverse as one can imagine. The fact that we create meaning, as opposed to receiving it or finding it, does not diminish its astounding quirkiness in the least. Whether one’s world is filled with an abundance of scientific or religious meaning, or some other kind, might not be as important as paying attention to the intentionality we bring to the act of world-creation itself. To this end noticing the words we choose to employ in making sense of our world cannot be underestimated. The limits of my language are the limits of my world, Wittgenstein noticed, meaning the ways in which we find life meaningless or meaningful has everything to do with the constructive nature of dialogues we entertain with others and within ourselves. Wordplay is no mere child’s play. The pen really is mightier than the sword.