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Jun. 17th, 2011 12:33 pmI'm always a bit confused by atheists et al. saying we make our own meaning in this world. Surely we don't in any strong sense of 'making' - our desires, though malleable, in fact squishy, are provided, as are the various materials that obstruct, change or to some degree sate them. It's important that so many of those materials have passed through human hands - or are human hands; perhaps those contribute to the 'we' of the 'we make,' softening the implication that a foreign will has invaded matter and is shaping it to some inscrutable prior selfhood: here it's the we that's making, the invasion is by number and the strange new unities arising within a waxing horde.
But they're not really stressing that, except in the sense that they understand that the achievements of an individual life draw on the various offered collectives of lives. Each of us makes her own meaning, they mean. Out of what's at hand, I'd add, including self, body, others, and because meaning-making is itself at hand, in our heads and habits. And because meaning is at hand too, frankly, to have allowed any of that to occur. The universe doesn't have a meaning, it is one - not a secret word with a more secret definition in that lost book defining universes, not a thing desired into saying, but something itself sayable. As an entirety? Not without loss or change, hence no, not quite. But the directions of loss and change are few. We get it wrong the way we make mistakes learning a foreign language - mostly the same mistakes over and over, and the same as all other speakers of ours make learning this other, and often the same ones the children raised into it make with their own.
We follow what allows meaning - what allows following, which is already meaning. And so much allows meaning and we so quickly chase new veins of it down to where we don't fit anymore that we see it, the big it, all the its as a source of frustration and our own arbitrary choice of new paths as the source of those paths, as the making of what we still need. Which is rather unfair.
But I'm unfair too, calling the universe something sayable, as though it's just some sayable thing, rather than every thing that will ever be said and a lot more that won't, while being not at all many more things that will never be said. Because it contains so much that's general we forget sometimes that it's specific. That in its fashion it's personal.
But they're not really stressing that, except in the sense that they understand that the achievements of an individual life draw on the various offered collectives of lives. Each of us makes her own meaning, they mean. Out of what's at hand, I'd add, including self, body, others, and because meaning-making is itself at hand, in our heads and habits. And because meaning is at hand too, frankly, to have allowed any of that to occur. The universe doesn't have a meaning, it is one - not a secret word with a more secret definition in that lost book defining universes, not a thing desired into saying, but something itself sayable. As an entirety? Not without loss or change, hence no, not quite. But the directions of loss and change are few. We get it wrong the way we make mistakes learning a foreign language - mostly the same mistakes over and over, and the same as all other speakers of ours make learning this other, and often the same ones the children raised into it make with their own.
We follow what allows meaning - what allows following, which is already meaning. And so much allows meaning and we so quickly chase new veins of it down to where we don't fit anymore that we see it, the big it, all the its as a source of frustration and our own arbitrary choice of new paths as the source of those paths, as the making of what we still need. Which is rather unfair.
But I'm unfair too, calling the universe something sayable, as though it's just some sayable thing, rather than every thing that will ever be said and a lot more that won't, while being not at all many more things that will never be said. Because it contains so much that's general we forget sometimes that it's specific. That in its fashion it's personal.
