Mattering and Meaning
We were talking about meaning the other day. I read something in Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained that seems relevant:
So the conscious mind is not just the place where the witnessed colors and smells are, and not just the thinking thing. It is where the appreciating happens. It is the ultimate arbiter of why anything matters…It stands to reason – doesn’t it? – that if doing things that matter depends on consciousness, mattering (enjoying, appreciating, suffering, caring) should depend on consciousness as well.
Mattering is about caring – therefore (surely?) meaning is related to caring – perhaps is another word for the same thing, or both words name the same thing but from different angles. I said much the same thing in the Comment – ‘Yes of course, we want to think our lives (hence the world they take place in) matter, have significance and importance, ‘mean’ something – something more than what they mean to us.’ Meaning is about what matters to us: what matters to us is what we care about. (At least, that seems to be part of what meaning is. I’m not claiming it’s an exhaustive account, and I don’t think it is, I think there’s more to it. But it’s a part.) All these words and ideas circle around a common knot or core. What is important and significant is what we care about, what matters to us, what means something to us. We could think of meaning, caring, importance, as sorting-devices: this item matters and that one doesn’t, because of what I care about, what is important to me. All a bit circular and subjective, obviously, but then that was my original point: that subjective is exactly what meaning is, and therefore it’s a bit of a dodge to claim that religion ‘gives’ meaning – it only gives it because we decide it does.
Caring is also interesting in a slightly different (though related) way: as motivation, as the engine that keeps our forward momentum going. This is (I take it) what Damasio is talking about in Descartes’ Error: people who have a kind of brain damage that impairs their ability to care even though it leaves cognitive abilities intact, can’t function properly. They don’t do anything, because they can’t decide among possibilities – even though they can understand and state pros and cons – because they don’t care. Indifference is a paralyzer, it seems. Which we all probably know from experience with depressed people or with depression. Depression plays hell with motivation.
We also know it because we know that ‘I don’t care’ can be a terrible, an appalling thing to say. It’s mildly rude even as an answer to trivial questions (What shall we make for dinner? Coffee or tea? Red or white?), and it’s brutality or worse as an answer to non-trivial questions or statements – ‘I’m frightened,’ ‘she needs help,’ ‘you hurt him when you said that,’ ‘there’s a genocide going on.’ Or for that matter ‘I love you,’ ‘she won first prize,’ ‘he’s safe.’ There’s a reason ‘Don’t care was made to care, don’t care was hanged’ was such a popular nursery saying. We need to care ourselves, and we need the people we care about to care too, or at least not to tell us they don’t. About some things we need everyone on the planet to care.
Sorge.
Heidegger, is it?
For some time now, when I am uncertain of the definition of a word–particularly one I’ve used and heard since day one–I’ve made a habit of trying to guess, to come up with my own def and THEN hauling out the dictionary. It sounds kind of like you do that too sometimes, and it can be good head-exercise.
My own attempt at defining “meaning”–the mass-noun sense, not the count-noun sense–seeemed to be that it had something to do with connections, and roots, in one’s head and perhaps out of it too. My dict. adds “significant quality, esp. implication of a hidden or special significance.” But you have added another layer of clarity by bringing out into the open that it has to do with caring about something. I just hadn’t quite got that one, how could I have missed it–now I wonder how many who talk about meaning know what it is.
Gee, maybe if enough people had good enough dictionaries they wouldn’t need religion?
I think it’s not exactly that I’m uncertain about the dictionary meaning of the word – it’s more that I’m thinking about and trying to work out what people mean by it when they use it for instance in arguments about religion. That’s often my interest in words – it has to do with the part they play in various public debates, rhetoric, etc. I suppose that almost rules out looking it up in the dictionary – that would be precisely the wrong approach for this kind of thing, because it wouldn’t answer the question, and it might contaminate the thinking process. If you see what I mean. The dictionary is one thing, and the glaze of connotation, association, implication etc the word picks up in general use is another thing. What I’m trying to get at is what people think it means when they use it in these contexts, rather than what it ‘officially’ means. (Which is not to say there’s not a lot of overlap between the two. Indeed for all I know the two are identical.)
Caring – yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it. All these different words conveying shades of ‘not indifferent’.
“…subjective is exactly what meaning is…”
By “subjective” do you mean “non-objective” and then would “non-objective” mean “non-physical”? If that’s the case, I don’t disagree at all, though your language-use is a bit odd…
I am intrigued by experiences which feel meaningful but no meaning is evident—for example, the Great Gate in Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, when the piano sounds like bells ringing; the finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird”, when the theme is played in different tempos; some sculptures by Henry Moore; and some paintings by Cezanne (but definitely not Renoir). Do I need to add that not everyone will feel the way I do about these particular examples, but I wd be surprised if anyone was unable to supply similar examples of their own? Probably not, but I’ll be extra safe.
I have read that similarly inarticulate feelings of meaningfulness can occur to men practicing close order military drill or in a football team when everything clicks. Or consider what it was like for the Germans at the giant Nazi rallies, with the speeches and the songs and the searchlights shining up into the sky. Based on this, I wonder how groups of early man might have felt as they sang and danced around a flickering fire. And how they wd have explained the experience to themselves the next day.
Maybe such feelings of meaningfulness lead people to think that there must be a source of meaning hiding somewhere inside the experience, something supernatural that took them over for that little time.
A friend, as a student, attended a lecture by A.J.Ayer. At a certain assertion my friend asked Ayer “what do you mean by that?”. Ayer replied “What do you mean by mean?”.
“I am intrigued by experiences which feel meaningful but no meaning is evident”
Exactly. And of course to a Martian or, say, an improbably reflective sea-slug, all our experiences are without evident meaning, but many of them feel meaningful to us. We think or assume there must be “a source of meaning” but can’t really find it…
“What do you mean by mean?” What a mean question. (Sorry!)
Do other languages or cultures also associate meaning with caring? Or is this just confined to English speaking cultures?
Are such language issues just provincial?
Dang good question. I don’t know – because I don’t know if other cultures do have a parellel concern with meaning. I think ‘care’ or what we mean by it is a pretty universal, generic concept. Though I could be wrong, obviously. (I suppose it’s possible to care about things, to have things matter to one, be important to one, without exactly realizing it, without putting it in those terms…Not sure though.) But meaning seems less – universalizable. It would be interesting to find out.
John Halasz mentioned ‘Sorge’, which is the German word for all this (care, etc), and which Heidegger talked about. But he declined to elaborate, and I know nothing about Heidegger.