Existential Agency Part II: The Dialectic of Meaning
We have a sense of agency in life, a perception of the ability to influence our own actions. While there are determining conditions for the decisions we make at any given point, we can perhaps preempt certain determinants and influence which choices are presented down the road. What about those decisions that correlate to our mental content, rather than physical actions?
When you enact a choice within a binary, it is immediately in the past. You have done the thing and now have a new binary of action to face, determining what will emerge next. These binaries can be overt decisions between A and B, or many infinitesimal decisions comprising the usual appearance of complexity. Whatever the case, action, or inaction, is inherently limiting.
The content of the life of our minds is perhaps similarly binary, however, it is not inherently limiting. That is, for example, holding one belief does not preclude holding an opposite belief. This can engender dissonance, which most people seek to escape through dogma or socialization, using external strictures to think for them. Erich Fromm describes a psycho-historical dialectic emerging in the individual’s need for freedom from external constraints for any meaningful freedom to enact themselves spontaneously and authentically. When we experience freedom from however, we feel hopeless, a sort of Durkheimian anomie, alienated from our social identity (where identity is largely determined by our social role; Cf. social character in Fromm). So, we use our freedom to in order to reposition ourselves within another constraining social order. This continues ad infinitum, preventing us from ever actually experiencing freedom lest we are willing to face the alienation of self-Othering.
Holding a belief and its opposite can also engender tension, an appreciation for the gray between any black or white. Someone like Mordecai Kaplan sought to do this in Reconstructionist Judaism, being excommunicated from his own seminary for seeking to hold tensions between Reform and Orthodox Judaism. Unique to his situation, his beliefs founded a new movement. And perhaps this is the catharsis of tension: the truth of two seemingly opposite beliefs forming a fuller version of truth than either could on its own.
It is unlikely that every belief is part and parcel of a larger truth. It seems, however, that there are important beliefs regarding certain existential realities whose fullness is only appreciated when with their own negation are sublated into a more encompassing truth.
Activity A is meaningful; Activity A is meaningless. First, a meaningful experience of Activity A is only substantively identified as meaningful by virtue of there being a meaningless experience of the same activity. Activity A is only meaningful because of its own negation. Second, when taken together, there emerges a deeper truth in the apparent contradiction: perhaps the creation of meaning in Activity A is a phenomenal [philosophically phenomenal, not just really great] characteristic revealing something behind or beyond the experience engendering the belief in the first place. As an agent participating in Activity A (to whatever extent of agency we have to choose such participation), we can perhaps invest in the experience to generate its meaning or meaninglessness. Thus, when believing that Activity A is both meaningful and meaningless, we synthesize the point and its negation to come to the deeper realization that we are agents thrown into an absurd situation in which both meaning and meaninglessness hold and are only able to act in ways that affirm this, creating meaning specifically by confronting meaninglessness.
Would it not be easier to simply say that Activity A can be meaningful or meaningless depending on certain external situations? For an individual action, sure. For the more widely applicable conclusion, no.
For a broad example, Activity A can be life taken as a whole. Claiming that the meaning of life taken as a whole depends on external situations (see previous paragraph) can be a difficult premise from which to respond to the problem of suffering. If the meaning of life depending on externalities founds the question of, for an example, if it is ethical to reproduce, then it is not sufficient to simply say it depends. The imposition of suffering demands a more certain answer. Consequently, the synthesized conclusion that we are agents in a meaningless world whose self-affirmation generates meaning becomes at least a neutral premise allowing for the discussion to go on. If we allowed it to depend on external circumstances, the imposition of suffering compounds the potential meaninglessness. There is no outcome from hedonistic calculus that will justify the tremendous suffering in the world, unless that suffering is reclaimed as an essential component of human life.
This is not a theodicy. This is not a reduction of human suffering. This is not a blind-eye turned toward too many realities in the world. This is a good faith statement about what mindfulness, intentionality, and hope actually require.
