The meaning of a life (and how meaningful it shall be) is related to the purpose of that life, but it is not quite the same thing. The purpose of my life is deliberated upon and ultimately decided (although not always, nor in most cases, by myself). On the other hand, the meaning of my life is not up to me whatsoever. In many ways, the meaning of a life is only determined after death, by those who have been affected by us; and even then, the meaning of (for instance) the life of Napoleon remains ambiguous and dependent on who is deliberating on the meaning of his life (historians, biographers, etc.).
But what is more important is to note the key difference: that purpose is determined before the fact, by the subject, whereas meaning is determined after the fact, of the subject. That is to say a number of things. Firstly, purpose is always temporally prior to meaning; which is the same as saying that meaning always occurs after the fact. An action that is still happening cannot be meaningful until it has been completed. Secondly, although both purpose and meaning are always “about” the subject, the subject can only be responsible for deliberating upon its purpose, which is the “direction” his or her life can take. Lastly, there is a medium through which purpose and meaning are related causally. That medium is the subject's life, which is simultaneously what we happen to do and where we happen to be while we are doing it. One is tempted to associate the purpose of a life to its actions, and the meaning to the context in which it lives; but this would be false. On the one hand, our purpose is just as much expressive of where we happen to be as it is of what we happen to do; on the other, our meaning is drawn just as much from our actions as it is drawn from our place in the world.
However, even in this clarification I feel that I have missed the particular significance of what it means to live a purposeful life, and what it means to live a meaningful life. I can say that I feel that my life has purpose; that is to say, that I feel that I am really going somewhere and doing something with my life. I can say that I feel that my life has meaning; that is to say, that I feel that what I am doing with my life is significant. In any case, purpose is a directing of the subject toward itself (my purpose, the purpose of my life), whereas meaning is always directed from the subject toward something else. I can live a purposeful life that is not meaningful: if my life and what I do with it matters only to myself. Similarly, I can live a meaningful life that is not purposeful: if I live my life unreflectively and yet manage to do something that matters to someone, or if I happen to be somewhere where my mere presence has drastic implications. I will not provide examples; I assume that you will be able to think of adequate ones yourself.
To bring the matter back to my last essay, “On the Progress of Technology”, we must introduce a third distinction. Not only is there a great difference between living purposefully and living meaningfully, there is a third possibility: living *deliberately*. I have carefully used the word “deliberate” up to this point in order to hint at the fact that the question of deliberation is always prior to questions of meaning and purpose. To ask whether it is possible to live a purposeful or meaningful life is necessarily to give oneself the responsibility to live and to act in a self-conscious and self-aware state-of-mind. In the very posing of the question, we already assume that the answering must just as self-aware as the questioning. We presume that the meaningful and purposeful life must be *deliberately lived* if it is to have any meaning or purpose at all.
Let us look a little closer at the relationships between these three concepts. Without directly addressing the definition of deliberateness itself, since I am quite sure that you know what it is to be deliberate, self-aware and conscious of oneself, let's dive directly into the types of deliberation.
There are two sorts, each of which corresponds to one side of the traditional mind-body dichotomy.
The first sort is related to the thoughts of a person (qua mind). I can consider what I am to do; that is, I can deliberately think. It is interesting, although not presently relevant to note how we can deliberate with one another upon a common thought. In this respect we may take notice of the fact that deliberation qua thought need not correspond to just one mind. But, I digress.
The second sort of deliberateness is related to the actions of a person (qua body). Anything that I do, I do either deliberately or habitually. If we are to value self-awareness and conscious living over the alternative, we must always value deliberate acts over habitual ones. We will not consider here the difference between good and bad habits except to say that if there are any good habits, it is only because we are incapable of being deliberately engaged in our worldly doings all of the time. If it were possible to always act deliberately, all habits would be bad habits. But for now, enough has been said regarding habit.
The ways are manifold in which deliberateness is related to the meaningful and the purposeful. In order to proceed from the twofold concept of deliberateness to the two concepts of purpose and meaning, I suggest the following “inner-to-outer” schema: from the mind and the act of deliberate consideration, to the body and the deliberate action thereof, to the world itself, toward which all notions of purpose and meaning are ultimately directed. Please be aware that, although I will primarily discuss these stages in their ideal form, the ideality of later stages is not necessarily dependent upon the ideality of the preceding ones. For example, I may make a deliberate action without having deliberated upon it.
My deliberate consideration of something, if it happens at all, is always prior to a purposeful action (which may or may not be deliberately performed). It is in this vein that we say that we consider our possibilities and make a decision as to what we shall do. Although decisions may be about actions, they are not part of the actions themselves. We can say that once someone makes a choice, that sets into motion a whole series of events, but that is only contingently true; that is, contingent upon following-through with that choice. The choice may be made, but it is only actual when it is acted upon and when events in the world are set in motion.
I may also make a deliberate action. The deliberate action always has a *certain* for-which; that is, it is always directed toward a specific purpose. In terms of thoughts, deliberation has its own certain for-which; that is, it is always aims at and is concerned with meaning. But, as we have seen, although purposive, deliberate actions always have their purpose determined by the subject itself, meaning-oriented, deliberate concerns always have their meaning determined by someone aside from the subject. In this way, we must look towards the world as the medium through which meaning and purpose are transmitted.
I cannot doubt that such-and-such person's action was for the purpose he intended, so long as his action was performed deliberately. We could say that the purpose of his action has been preserved in the world it has affected, but that would be misleading. Here, although we may consider the world as the medium for the transmission of a knowledge of purposiveness between one mind and another, that is not really true. The purposive is inherently tied up in actions, which are always happenings that occur in the world. In this sense, purpose inheres within the world itself and that which pertains to it, namely bodies. Minds have nothing to do with the matter.
However, I can doubt why someone does what they do and what is meant by their actions, whether they deliberate upon doing them beforehand or not. We could say that the meaning of his actions has been obfuscated by the world, but again that would be misleading. Making use of this metaphor that describes the transmission of meaning from one mind through the world to another mind, raises more questions than it answers; in fact, it answers no questions at all, merely presenting us with a highly obtrusive schema of reckoning. That which is meaning-directed is inherently tied up with concernful consideration, qua the mind. In this sense, meaning inheres only within minds. The world has nothing to do with the matter.
[Let us digress to the epistemological question of how it is that communication between minds is possible. The only way that meaning moves from one mind into another is by entering into a common understanding. In other words, the only way that I can be intelligible for you is by dissolving the artificial boundaries that separate your mind from every other mind, boundaries that are always personal edifices, and therefore can always be brought down by personal act of the will. I am responsible for my cognitive boundaries, and you are responsible for yours. In order for communication to be facilitated, those boundaries must come down. Is it then a question of isolation-or-intimacy? Perhaps there are extremes which we may display for the sake of contrast, but most of the time we do not operate on the black-or-white scale of logical extremism. Rather, there is a vast spectrum that we may traverse, between total intimacy and total isolation, in our quest toward communication and the revelation of one's own-most, personal being. In most instances we may communicate with one another very understandingly and yet quite impersonally. I can order a cup of coffee and, with some minor clarifications, get precisely what I want. I can address what is concerning you, even if it is a very personal matter, by acquiring the proper disposition and mode of asking. And when you discuss your personal matters, you may do so with precisely the comfort level that works for you, by perhaps speaking in terms of abstracts or euphemism, or by saying little and making your emotional needs come forward rather than your emotional concerns. And whatever level of intimacy that is made use of is always highly transitory, since it is conditional on the need to communicate. Also, perhaps I am starved for intimacy and once I approach a certain level of intimacy with a person, I wish to preserve that level at all costs; so I seek more and more things to be communicated. Here the need to communicate is always the need to communicate one's own desire for intimacy and the desire that it be fulfilled in this very act of communication itself.]
Although both purpose and meaning are “about” the world, purpose inheres in the world and that which pertains to it, whereas meaning only refers to the world and itself only ever inheres in the minds of subjects. If that is so, then how is it that we consider purpose and meaning to be nearly synonymous? In the beginning of this discourse, the two concepts seemed to be very close to one another, yet now there seems to be a vast chasm separating them. Naturally, the problems lies in the schema that we have chosen to use in order to sketch out the relationship between purpose, meaning, and deliberateness, which was modeled after the mind-body dichotomy. Rather than trying to preserve the schema, I shall assume that its utility has already been made transparent and proceed to show how it is that this duality can be so wrong, and yet so right.
If purpose inheres within the world and within bodies, how is it that I can say that I know the purpose of a given action, since knowledge and knowing are matters of the mind? Conversely, if meaning inheres withing minds, how is that I can call an action meaningful? Let us be immediately aware that these questions are not hard questions to answer whatsoever. The only difficulties lie in the language that we have chosen to make use of; no difficulties whatsoever lie within the actual matter at hand.
However, it would be patently false to say that the difficulty in question (that of how the mind and the body correlate) is a merely philosophical concern. Dichotomous pairings are what human beings naturally make us of in order to make sense of the world around them; and such pairings are not arbitrary. Rather, those differences that are brought into sharp relief within the context of the dichotomous relationship are themselves differences of things as they really are, not merely as they are perceived to be. Only a fool would argue that water is solid and ice is gaseous. It would be just as absurd to suggest that there is not “really” any difference between water and ice; just as absurd to suggest that there is not any similarity between the two. We can always find both similarities and differences: water and ice are different because of the distance between their constituent molecules, but they are the same because they both consist the molecule H2O.
It is the same way with the mind-body dichotomy. They are different, but they are the same. My mind is embodied qua my brain, although it is not exactly the same as my brain, since much of what I associate with my mind is a function of my central nervous system. Also, even if one expands the association to the whole central nervous system, we still cannot say to have sufficiently bracketed the mind itself, for the mind is affected by the body: it operates differently depending on the amount of sleep one has had and depending on the emotions one is having (at this time we will not address the question of the emotions, which can neither be placed exclusively within the domain of the mind nor within that of the body; similarly, we will not consider the soul either). Also, although my body circumscribes my whole being, it does not itself constitute the whole of my being. I am not merely this material something, for I have thoughts that cannot be “read off” from my brain by an outside observer, no matter how advanced brain-scanning technology ever gets. And even if that does become the case, how could the technology ever *read* off the thoughts without an understanding of language? For although the materialist thesis has not yet been indubitably disproved, it is certain that language itself is not a material matter, since language exists within a total culture of minds and not within a mind in isolation. So, even if our thoughts could be read off of our brains, they would not be intelligible without an understanding of an immaterial, purely conceptual language.
In order to begin any philosophic line of inquiry, it must be decided what key terms we are to be navigating around, and what key terms we will be negotiating with. Inquiry can be tactful or untactful; even when we are engaging ourselves with words alone. We can interrogate these words, aggressively challenging them to defend themselves; or we can flirt with those same words, following them to where they lead us. I suppose then that there are three modes of inquiring into the words themselves: aggressive interrogation, flirtatious navigation, and aggressive-flirtatious negotiation.
We are making use here of several different metaphors. By talking about aggressive and flirtatious modes of inquiry, we are speaking of words sexually, in terms of the possibility of sexual congress. In that manner, sexuality is the outward expression of the inward essence of any given person. That I want to engage you sexually means that I want to engage the essence of your being. For these purposes, we are comparing the outward expression of a person's sexual desires to the outward appearance of the word itself (the signifier); where the inward essence of one's own being is the conceptual heart of the sign (the signified), that which eludes us and that which we desire. In a sexual scenario, the object of our desire can be aggressively seized, whether our heart's desire wishes it or not. This we call rape. Alternatively, this same object can be lured to come toward us; that is, that which we desire can be encouraged to also desire us. This sexual reciprocity of desire is what we call romance. (a single essence)
The other metaphor we are making use of is that of the literal journey from one place to another, in terms of the navigation of the sea. In this instance, the meaning of the word is not analogous to the end of our journey. Rather, we recognize that the meaning of the word (the signified) is all around us – it is the sea itself. This analogy is very useful and apt – in our search for the word, the word is constantly all around us. We continuously make use of the word in our journey toward the word itself. Nowhere is the word far from us; indeed, it is always very close to hand.
In the first instance, we are considering the essence of the word. We wish to find a singular wholeness that is the essence of the word itself; nonetheless, we are very aware that the essence is quite far from us, and a whole procedure of discovery is necessary in order to come to a direct understanding of the essence itself.
In the second instance, we are considering the various meanings of the word. We are aware that the meaning of a word lies in its usage, and that the reason a single word is made use of in many different contexts is that the many meanings bear a family resemblance to one another. In the first sense we seek a singular essence, in the second, we acknowledge that there is no essence at all, but a mere family resemblance among the different meanings.
The essence of the word is seen partially in the Wittgenstein-ian sense, namely that the meaning of the word lies in its usage; nevertheless, it is seen partially in another light, in the traditional Platonic-Aristotelean perspective, that there is a single essence upon which all the individual usages of the word are based. (many usages which bear a family resemblance to one another)
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