Beginning to think through some things about giving meaning to

Drawing on Nietzsche and his own harrowing experiences in the concentration camps to which he lost his family, Viktor Frankl re-emphasized the importance of finding meaning of some sort in order to survive. We are meaning-needing creatures. I don't know that this is unique to us. Domesticated animals, at least, can become listless, bored, and depressed without some directed activity. Most of us have also seen animals in the zoo pacing a dirt-path in their enclosures perhaps because the activity toward which their lives would normally be directed or devoted have been taken from them.

We can give meaning to the world and to objects in it. This is more plausibly unique to us as a species. We are not only need-ers of, but also creators of, meaning. And, we can give meaning not just to words, but also to objects and places and any number of things. A trivial example: I have a small pebble, blood-colored and roughly in the shape of a heart. It has a meaning for me, though it of course has no meaning in itself, no natural meaning. (That's saying nothing more than objects in the world are not intentional unless they are given intentionality by semantic monsters like us.)

What I've been puzzling over recently is the difficulty of giving meaning to an object. The pebble for instance has a meaning that I gave to it, but I wasn't able to do that as a pure act of the will. It should be clear that I'm playing loosely with the notion of meaning, thinking about denotation and connotation and various other members of the family of meanings, but it seems to me in any case, an individual isn't enough to give something meaning. There's Wittgenstein's private language argument in the Investigations—unless there is no such argument to be found—but there's also a more general sense in which I think one individual cannot create meaning out of whole cloth. The pebble has the kind of meaning it does for me because of some of its own characteristics (shape, color, etc.) and the context of its being found by me while walking my dog Mateo and the subsequent events of Mateo's death shortly thereafter. None of these is sufficient for it to have any kind of meaning; though a human is necessary to give meaning even if—as in this case—the meaning is in a sense private—a meaning only for me—I don't think I could give whatever meaning I wished to whatever object or word or experience just by an act of the will, by fiat. That's the sense, it seems to me, in which the perhaps-illusory private language argument is correct: no individual by herself is sufficient to create meaning, because meaning has to be answerable to some other constraint in order really to be meaning. 

Even in the case of language, I'm not sure that constraint has to be another language user.

That's just semantics! (But isn't it all?)

Earlier today I was involved in several discussions about whether it was best to describe this as "gay bashing," or something else. There's no value in rehashing all the issues here, but I was arguing that it is bad pragmatically and ethically to characterize all anti-homosexual opinion or statements as "gay bashing," in much the same way that denying—as most Christians do—that Muslims will go to Heaven is "Muslim bashing." (I know the issues are not exactly parallel.) And, I think that doing this denigrates the experiences of those who have been bashed. Besides, I think taking the mantle of victimhood is to fight from a place of weakness.

One of the most important things that these discussions reminded me of was that pace Plato, philosophical training does not prepare one for political discussions, let alone political power. At least in the system we have, the practice of making distinctions—and that's what philosophers do—is not all that appreciated (or, probably, helpful).

But, the other thing that came back to me was that when distinctions are made, the most common move is to say, "That's just semantics." I think we must learn this move from some well-meaning high school teacher who wants to teach us that there are real distinctions and then there are ones that are merely semantic. You know, ones that are just playing around with words. There are facts and there are words. There is a world and there is a representation of it.

Apart from the fact that this claim falls flat from those who have just been arguing that it is very important that legal same-sex relationships be termed "marriage"—isn't that just semantics, too—there is a deeper, almost existential problem with this.

One might have all sorts of things to say about human nature, but almost anyone has to admit that one of the most amazing things about us, if it is not the defining characteristic, is that we are semantic beasts. We live in a web of language. As Dan Dennett puts it, we weave narrative selves throughout our lives. We interact with one another through and in terms of language. We understand ourselves through our discussions with others (and with ourselves), through our diaries and journals and blogs. For Christ's sake, we tattoo words on our bodies and engrave them on buildings and put them on our clothes. The Abrahamic religions have God speaking the universe into existence and the first man beginning his career by giving names to all the animals. Christians (following the Stoics) worship the Word of God.

We spend all the time talking and texting and writing and reading and singing words, words, words. 

And, alone (?) among the animals, we look for meaning in our lives and in the world. Nietzsche got it right when he said that we were so terrified of a life devoid of meaning that we will take anything, including the Void, as our meaning. We create meaning, we search for meaning, we need meaning. And, we put it into words.

So, when someone says that a disagreement is semantic, or just about meaning, or just about words, she seems to be saying that the disagreement isn't real or isn't about the world. But, what can be more real that the way in which we do and must encounter and think about and represent the world. 

Yes, it's semantics, because it all is.

Apologies and explanations

I should preface this by saying I'm not a particularly good person. I try and I fail. Sometimes, I don't try. And, often when I fail I do not apologize in the way that I should. And, that is another failing, another failing for which I should beg forgiveness.

Begging forgiveness is something that we have been losing as a society. Whether we are talking about politicians and pundits—that class that has so many opinions that each of them is nigh to worthless—apologizing for leading the United States into the Iraq war; or Bill Clinton apologizing for signing DADT and DOMA; students apologizing for cheating on tests or papers; government officials apologizing for not providing the public with services or for cheating on their spouses or stealing funds; servers and store managers apologizing for overcharging customers; or just your run-of-the-mill apology after a less-than-ideal human interaction, we have lost the very kernel of what it means to apologize.

Our mea culpas aren't mea culpas anymore. This is just because they don't stop with—or often even involve—a claim of fault. They are explanations: with the information we had, the Iraq war looked necessary; given the position of the country at the time, DADT and DOMA were the best options, anyway look at how bad Jesse Helms was; I am under a lot of pressure this semester and I don't really understand what plagiarism means; we have to prioritize governments services and that concern of yours for the better part of a decade matters a lot to me, but I'd have to convince others and they aren't convinced; I cheated because I was under so much stress loving America; ....

The method is to explain the circumstances so that the aggrieved will see that, were she in the same situation, she would have done the same thing. Rather than apologizing, we explain. We want the injured to understand and we seem to believe the old saw that to understand all is to forgive all.

We also in this way ignored the injured. I suppose the dead in Iraq don't matter; those whose lives were destroyed by DADT aren't really important; etc., because can't you see how my hands were tied?

But to explain is not to ask forgiveness; it is really the opposite. It is to say that really I didn't do anything wrong. Maybe it is the latent Catholicism in me, but I was taught long ago that when you ask someone—God or man—to forgive you, you don't explain, at least not in the first instance. There is something deeply suspect in trying to do that. You say that you are sorry. You are sorry because you did something wrong. And, you will strive not to do it again. And, you will make up the injury as much as possible. The confessional isn't the place for rationalization.

At that point—but only when asked for or when forgiveness has really been offered—does it make sense to explain. Of course I should try to see how, as an aggrieved person, I might well have done the same thing. But, when the person who has injured me demands that I do, they aren't asking for forgiveness. Instead, they are trumpeting their own moral rectitude, harmed only by circumstances. And, they are demanding that I understand and, so, forgive.

In a real request for forgiveness, there is the risk that one won't be forgiven. But all genuinely worthy activities include risk.

In the guise of self-knowledge—we say that people have engaged in a lot of soul searching—people hide their own mistakes behind exculpatory explanations. And, then we call them brave for realizing and admitting their mistakes.

Asking for forgiveness takes courage. Explanations that are really excuses take none.

A question with only one answer

Apparently, among the questions eharmony.com asks its victims customers is this doozy: "Are you self aware?" The company prides itself on the depth of this question so much that it includes in its ads a woman who is amazed that no other matchmaking site had ever asked her this before.

But let's think about this for a second. If you fail to be self-aware, you will fail to be aware of this failing of yours and will answer, "Yes, I am self aware." If you are self-aware, you will answer, "Yes, I am self aware." So, how would this question differentiate between site-members. 

Answer: It wouldn't. What it would do is make those people who had kicked some money to the site feel that, contrary to fact, they were actually being evaluated based on their character traits, character traits that can be evaluated according to a questionnaire—an empty set if ever there was. I suspect that matchmaking websites have slightly less depth than the psychic around the corner. 

NB: In the case of the actually self-aware, this person might actually see themselves as being less than ideally self-aware. So, if anything, there would be a negative correlation between claims to self-awareness and actual self-awareness. 

A point of rhetoric

In the recent discussions of Sarah Palin's youngest child and now of the pregnancy of her teenage daughter there have been numerous iterations of the "courage" of Palin in "choosing to have her child though he has Downs Syndrome—we will leave aside the deep insult that this is to people with Downs, many of whom I have counted as friends—and know of the "pride" that her family has in their daughter for "deciding" to keep the child. While this rhetoric may serve Palin and McCain well, it is utterly confused. Palin believes—or claims to—that abortion is immoral, it is the taking of an innocent life. We call the taking of an innocent life murder. 

So, if Palin really believes what she claims to, her rhetoric and that of her supporters makes no sense. We don't speak of the courage of someone who doesn't commit murder when it might be more convenient so to do. We don't speak of pride in the non-murderer when they decide not to murder. It may be that she and her daughter are praiseworthy for doing what is morally required, some might say, in a society where many do not, but only exactly in the same way as one is when they refrain from any other immorality. It is not as if she has done the supererogatory.