The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is more than I feel capable of getting into, so I would like just to work with a simpler more seat of the pants understanding of what makes our experience meaningful. The key word is “connection,” and how things connect in any number of ways. When we see a connection or make a connection there is meaning. When we don’t see it, there is meaninglessness. The discrete elements in our experience are meaningless to us unless or until they fall into a meaningful pattern in which each element is connected to the other in a way that makes sense.
We read a poem for instance, and the meaning eludes us; the words don’t make sense. We know the meanings for each word, but they don’t connect with one another in any meaningful way; it seems to be quasi-gibberish on first reading. We try again, still nothing, no connection, then perhaps several times more, and it hits us and the words vibrate not only with their interconnectedness among themselves but with something in us that comes alive in response to them. Or is it that something awakens in us that has given the words their meaning? That constitutes the meaning of the words in a way similar to the way that the poet constituted them. Reading is not a passive activity; it is a creative one; it is a meaning-constituting activity. But the meanings are not arbitrary; they are not just what I capriciously decide the poem means. My experience of the poem’s meaning is the experience of something in me that lies dormant as it lies dormant in the poem, a potentio that has become actus. What is in me is stimulated by my encounter with the poem but it is not simply given by the poem. The meaning doesn’t come alive until by an act of will I awaken it in my struggle to understand what the poem means.
You have been acquainted with someone for a long time—a classmate, a coworker, a neighbor—and because there is nothing apparently extraordinary about her in any way, she is just a part of the environment, someone who’s just there. As such she means very little to you. Then one day something happens; she reveals herself in some way. Maybe a kind word or she overhears something you say that interests her and she comments on it or perhaps she says something that interests you. You make a connection, you suggest going out for a coffee, and this person becomes meaningful for you in a way that was not possible before. You were always connected in potentialis; it was not until that moment that it was made actus.
Meaning comes from the way words connect with other words. The way people connect with one another, the way memory connects us with our past and imagination with our future. Meaning has a cognitive aspect but also a feeling aspect, and both contribute to the experience of meaningful connection.
Meaning, it could be said. is the gift of Eros, the god of connection—for all connection has an erotic dimension to it. He who has the most meaning has the most eros. Eros or feeling connected is what makes life worth living, and to the degree that we lack eros in our lives, our lives lack meaning. The person’s life is most meaningful who lives in a world of profound and broad connections, who sees connections or makes connections wherever he goes. His life is poor and meaningless whose connections are superficial and few.
The difference between modern man and primitive man is that for the latter the connections are obvious and given in their experience of the world around them; they are all already actus. For the modern they are hidden and mostly we moderns and postmoderns are mostly aware of the disconnections and the lack of meaning. But is it that there is no meaning or that we have failed to awaken the connections that lie dormant until we find some way to activate them?
Most people would say that their lives have meaning, and to the degree that that is true, it is in most cases a meaning that is given to them in their socialization by the culture and the traditions into which they were raised. It is a ‘given’ meaning, and I do not want to depreciate the importance of that especially in the role it plays in maintaining social order. Without traditions and the institutions that support them our lives would be chaos. But it is obvious to me that there is something essential to the spirit of modernity that destroys tradition. Everywhere modernity has established itself, traditions have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity or westernization or globalization as a threat. It will destroy their traditions as it has destroyed the traditions of the West. Their culture will go down just as the culture of the American Indian did. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now even turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have grown up since the Enlightenment.
There are pockets of surviving living tradition here and there —particularly where premodern ethnic cultures still survive—and one can observe how tradition still serves its purpose of transferring from one generation to the next a sense of cultural vitality and identity that is genuinely meaningful for those who live in them. But the future for such traditions is bleak. I would be surprised if in three or four generations time there are any except in the most remote backwaters of the globe that retain genuine vitality. It is more liikely tht they will have been museumized in things like the St. Patrick’s Day parades or other rituals that will have become as evacuated of any authentic cultural vitality as a Disneyland exhibit. No traditional culture I'm aware of has shown itself capable of withstanding the withering effect of the new globalization, whose ultimate goal would appear to be to turn the earth into a gigantic strip mall. The future A sterile world in which all meaning except commercial meanings have been stripped away.
So the problem lies in that the traditions, while they continue provide a certain kind of order, no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain a certain shape given to them by the force that once lived in them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So meaning in the modern age has withered into eros-less abstraction, and its culture has become what African Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless, Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away.
This is the point that Barfield and Nietzsche both agree on. Both saw that the world of given meanings and given connection no longer has life in it, and that it is collapsing. And both recognized that the meaning has gone into hiding in the depths of the human soul and that the new human task is to renew the face of the earth by making what is hidden in potentialis manifest in actualis. And both agree that this is a human task that must be undertaken in freedom and that the nobility and dignity of the future human being depends on his willingness to undertake this task which is to make what is implicit in the human soul explicit.
Some can get on ok with a minimum of meaning, but most people who feel that there is a meaning vacuum in their lives seek to fill it, or at least think that it can be filled, with a sexual relationship, and this is at least partially an explanation for the overly sexed character of our cultural imagination. People are starved for meaning, which means they are starved for eros, which means that they think they can find both in sex. This was Don Juan’s project. As humans it is a given that we are incomplete projects, and there has always been a profound longing for completion. Completion occurs when the implicit connections all become explicit. Right now we are in a condition of connection potentialis.
This is an important point because what has happened in the modern world evacuated of traditional given connections and meanings has been a felt diminution of our sense of connection to most things in the world, and this is directly correlated to our experience of the diminution of Eros. Eros is a deus otiosus
Nietzsche and Barfield are saying that the web or network of meanings that came to us as a given no longer work, that we are living in a dead-tree world rather than in a living world vibrant with life and meaning. Barfield’s word to describe a human experience rich with connection and meaning is participation, and it comes in two varieties ‘original’ and ‘final.’ His word to describe our life lived among the dead trees is idolatry. Original participation is experienced by animist cultures in which everything is connected and merged into one another and in which the world is alive with spirit. Remnants of original participation lingered on in Europe through the medieval period and even into the nineteenth century in some rural areas where the old ways hadn’t quite died. But what emerged in the West during the modern period was a phenomenal world from which layer upon layer had been stripped away until all that remained was a kind of minimalist husk whose meaning was mostly defined by its utilitarian or economic value. Rather than the I-Thou relationship that is more characteristic of aboriginal cultures.
Think abut the way American Indians killed their buffalos with a prayer of gratitude to the buffalo spirit for its sacrifice for his and his tribe’s benefit and the wanton slaughter of the white man who had not the least sense about what the Indian could mean, and for whom the buffalo “means” nothing because he experiences no vital connection with this beast except for its food value and the money it might bring him for its hide. It might be asked at this point whose life has more meaning? The Indian or the white man? The gut modern response would be to think the Indian naïve and deluded and so whatever meaning experience he had in his felt connection to the buffalo was illusory.
Both Nietzsche and Barfield accept this loss of traditional given meaning, and each suggest a way of reconstituting the world from within, but the way that each seeks to do this is very different. N. and the twentieth century thinkers who are his heirs seek to constitute the world with meaning from below because they don’t really believe that there is an above. Barfield does believe there is an above--the Logos-- but above is not where we find it; rather it’s found now within. From burning bush to burning heart. Working with meanings that come from below is easier because more easily available in the instincts symbolized by sex, money, and power. Barfield's reconstitution project is more difficult because the still small voice of the Logos is not easy to detect amid the roar of the instinctual life and the kind of culture that it has created.
N. thought that he was doing something that was nobler than just exalting the instinctual life, because he embraced and ethic of self-transcendence and affirmed a kind of aristocracy of the spirit among those who refuse slavery and choose to be masters of their own fates. I have no quarrel with him as far as that goes, and he cannot be blamed for how his thought has been distorted by those who claim him as an important influence. Look at the crimes that have been committed in the name of Jesus Christ. But he says that the aristocrat uebermensch makes his own meaning, but is meaning created ex nihilo--or is it rather uncovered and actualized? There is a very important difference, because in the long run by what criterion can we judge that the Nazis or Batman's Joker misappropriated Nietzsche's will to power doctrine? If meaning is what by the power of our will we alone constitute it to be, anything we constitute as meaningful is permitted, no matter how barbaric. Who knows if N. would have rejected Nazism. His philosophical heir Heidegger didn’t.
Enough for now on this. The challenge of course for Christians, the way I see it, is to accept that the connections are there--as they are in the mind of the Poet--they simply have to be discovered and awakened from their slumber. And that is a difficult but noble work.