The Meaning of Meaninglessness

158 Pages·1974·5.908 MB·English

by  Gene Blocker (auth.)

THE MEANING OF MEANINGLESSNESS
The Meaning
of
Meaninglessness
by
GENE BLOCKER
I I
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1974
For Margaret and Harry
© 1974 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlallds
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st Edition 1974
All rights reserved, including the right to trallslate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1595-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2033-6
001: 10.1007/978-94-010-2033-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION IX
Chapter 1. THE DIVERSITY OF MEANING 1
Chapter 2. THE UNITY OF MEANING 33
Chapter 3. MEANING AND MEANINGLESSNESS 73
Chapter 4. THE TRAGIC SENSE OF MEANINGLESSNESS 102
Chapter 5. BACK TO SQUARE ONE 114
BIBLIOGRAPHY 143
INDEX 145
Once a boy met a girl. They agreed to a race. The boy chased the
girl from dawn to salfana, 2 p.m. prayers. They prayed and rested.
The boy then drove the girl from salfana to lansara, 5 p.m. prayers.
By this time the boy was bleeding and vomiting blood. He fell on
the ground. The girl turned back and picked him up.
What happened? asked the boy. You are a girl,
I am a man. I chase you from morning
till night and yet you cannot be held.
You are a foolish boy!
I agree to your word and you enter into
an agreement with me without asking my name.
You just chase me.
You are very foolish.
You trouble yourself unnecessarily.
Girl, what is your name?
My name is Duniya. I am the World.
No one can hold the world.
You can chase the world until you are tired,
until your hands are bleeding.
From the time you are a small child,
from the time you grow and learn the kuran,
from the time you pass through circumcision
until your hair grows white and your mouth
is collapsed and toothless, you may chase the world.
But no one will hold Duniya. Now you are a man.
VIII
You have a wife of your own. Yet you follow me
without asking my name. The world is wide and
long. If you go to the right, those on the left
will not know you. If you go to the left, those
on the right will not know you. If you go up
the people below will not know you. If you go
down the people above will not know you.
Duniya is wide. Duniya is long.
My name is Do What You Are Able. Although
you try, you cannot win the world. The world will
win you .... Duniya ita tola.
(A Mandingo tale narrated by Sara Madi Dumbuya,28/2/68, Port
Loko, Sierra Leone, West Africa and translated by Mary Howard.)
INTRODUCTION
What does "meaningless" mean? On the one hand, it signifies
simply the absence or lack of meaning. "Zabool" is meaningless
just because it doesn't happen to mean anything. "Green flees time
lessly" is meaningless, despite a certain semblance of sense, because
it runs afoul of certain fundamental rules of linguistic construction.
On the other hand, "meaningless" characterizes that peculiar psycho
logical state of dread and anxiety much discussed, if not discovered,
by the French shortly after the Second World War. The first is
primarily linguistic, focusing attention on emotionally neutral
questions of linguistic meaning. The second is nonlinguistic,
indicating a painful probing of the social psychology of an era,
a clinical and literary analysis of 20th century Romanticism. On the
one hand, a job for the professional philosopher; on the other hand,
a task for the literary critic and the social historian.
Is any useful purpose served in trying to combine these two, very
different concerns? As the title of this book suggests, I think there is.
In what follows I try to show that there is an important connection
between linguistic meaning and the feeling of nausea, dread and
absurdity described by the Existentialists, and that the latter consti~
tutes an important, though neglected field for the study of meaning,
whether linguistic or otherwise. Indeed, I will argue that linguistic
meaning can be properly understood only in the broader context
of this nonlinguistic meaning. In this sense, "the meaning of meaning
lessness" suggests a fundamental reexamination of the "meaning
of meaning."
There is, of course, a very widespread contemporary use of words
like "meaninglessness" and "absurdity" on the part of critics, literary
historians, sociologists, and the like, for describing a mass socio
historical, psychological fact of our times. Yet it has never been made
x INTRODUCTION
sufficiently clear what this means. The feelings of nausea, claustro
phobia, density and vertigo have been carefully and sensitively
described, but the sense in which these psychological moods either
are, or contribute to, a loss of meaning is far from being satisfactorily
explained.
As a result, some writers, those in the above mentioned group, use
these terms as though they required no explanation, in some cases
arguing that, being feelings, such things cannot be explained but
must be experienced or "lived through" in order to be understood.
This provides the perfect foil for a second group of writers, this time
the "analytic" philosophers, who, for this very reason, dismiss all
such talk as nonsense, that is, a misuse of the term "meaning."
Meaning, they say, has to do with units of language, words, sentences,
etc.; that the world should be meaningful or that life could be meaning
less is simply a confusion of language, simply a misunderstanding
of what we mean by "meaning."
My own aim is philosophical, though not narrowly so. I intend
to provide a conceptual analysis which is at once a reasonably rigorous
philosophical account of meaninglessness in its relation to various
kinds and senses of meaning, but which is at the same time as true
to the modern feeling of meaninglessness and absurdity as a con
ceptual analysis can be to its subject matter. Should this help to
bridge the "credibility gap" between English-speaking "analytic"
philosophers and their Continental counterparts, the Phenom
enologists and the Existentialists, I would be very pleased, but this
is not my primary objective.
Admittedly, the task I am outlining is not an easy one; we tend
to approach questions of meaning and meaninglessness from one
of several fixed points of view. The traditional account of meaning,
from Hobbes to Richards, is narrowly intellectual, while the dissenting
Romantic tradition, from Coleridge to Ionesco, tends to the opposite,
anti-intellectual side of the same coin. Within the framework of these
historical perspectives, the position I wish to develop would thus
seem to be "caught between a rock and a hard place", to vary the
usual classical allusion. For this reason, we will have to break new
ground in our approach to the theory of meaning, not without
acknowledging, however, a considerable debt to the pioneering work
of Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
We will want to throw open the question of meaning as widely
as possible at first, merely listing and describing a surprising variety
INTRODUCTION XI
of different senses and uses of "meaning" and "meaningless," before
trying to sift out the larger strands or kinds of meaning to see how
they are related to one another. These will include, besides linguistic
meaning, meaning in the sense of purpose or intention, meaning as
the systematic interrelatedness of parts within a whole, and the
recognition of something as the kind of thing which it is, which I will
call "being-as," a philosophical play on the term "seeing-as." The
lack of anyone of these, with the exception of linguistic meaning,
will result in the kind of meaninglessness described by the Existential
ists. I will try to push my analysis further and say that in the broadest
sense meaning is a kind of interpretation, or projection thrown upon
the world, the recognition of which is a sense of meaninglessness.
This points to a curiously paradoxical relationship between meaning
and meaninglessness which is the real subject of the book, adding a
further dimension to "the meaning of meaninglessness." For, in one
sense, if meaning is a kind of projection and the recognition of
projection is a sense of meaninglessness, then the sense of meaningless
ness rests squarely on the nature of meaning. Looking at it the other
way, if meaning is only possible by a kind of projection which is
regarded as meaningless, then, equally, meaning rests on the con
ditions of meaninglessness. Indeed, the irony can be brought out
more forcefully. If meaninglessness is the recognition of the inter
preted, or projective nature of meaning, then meaninglessness, in one
sense at least, is simply the recognition of the nature of meaning.
Thus, an analysis of meaning seems to dissolve into a discussion
of meaninglessness, while meaninglessness, on the other hand,
dialectically reduces to a kind of meaning. But this is very strange.
How can the recognition of the nature of meaning lead to, or con
stitute, the feeling of meaninglessness? How can projection be both
a necessary condition for meaning and also a necessary condition
for meaninglessness?
The point is not to gloat over these fine ironies, but to provide
some initial suggestion of the riches to be unpacked from the deeply
ambiguous interrelatedness of meaning and meaninglessness. In one
sense "meaning" signifies a kind of projection we confer upon things,
but in another sense, it signifies just the opposite. It is often said,
for example, that meaning is simply an interpretation we assign to
things, that things don't have the meanings we thought they had.
But this implies that meaning is not projection, but something inherent
in and indentical with the things themselves. On the one hand we
XII INTRODUCTION
recognize that meaning is a conventional designation, not an inherent
feature in the world; on the other hand we insist that meaning must be
an ingredient in the real nature of the thing itself without which
that thing is meaningless. While recognition of the interpretive,
"projection" character of meaning reinforces the first sense of meaning
(projection), it is diametrically opposed to the second (nonprojection)
sense of meaning. Thus, it follows from this preliminary analysis
that meaninglessness is not absolutely opposed to meaning, as a
superficial logical analysis would suggest. Meaninglessness is fully
compatible with meaning in the sense of projection; it is only incompa
tible with a non projective sense of meaning which simply identifies
meaning with reality. But this identification is highly suspect, as we
will see, and this suggests that resolving the tragic modern sense of
meaninglessness is primarily the clearing away of a dust we have
raised ourselves (an allusion to Zen Buddhism, which we will discuss
in Chapter 5, as well as to Berkeley), the dust being the nonprojective
sense of meaning.
Each of these, for the moment, cryptic statements indicates a major
theme to be developed in subsequent chapters. Thus, for example,
Chapter 3 is an exploration of the idea that, historically, the search
for meaning has led to a sense of meaninglessness, that, paradoxically,
a necessary condition for the tragic modern sense of meaninglessness
is a naive objectivist, or nonprojective, sense of meaning. This is
exemplified in a number of different ways; in the scientist's struggle
to get to the bottom of things (which results in a "neutralization
of nature"), in the philosopher's search into the conditions of truth
and meaning, in the phenomenon Heidegger calls "fallenness," and
in the inevitable frustration, described by the mystic, of trying to
hold the world in a fishnet of concepts. As Heidegger points out,
we lose ourselves in a world of things; naively we are absorbed in a
"real" world of nonprojective, "objective" meaning. This is what
makes possible a meaningful "world," but it is also the first step
towards a sense of meaninglessness since this absorption conceals
the fact that a meaningful world is a human accomplishment, a pro
jection of man's self onto the world. The encroachment of meaning
lessness is held at bay only by "bad faith," throwing ourselves ever
more desparately into the acquisition and enjoyment of things which
themselves become less and less meaningful. But this only masks the
problem, driving it deeper. Thus, the underlying uneasiness, the
fear of waking up to meaninglessness becomes more acute, more out