Meaning and meaning: An Important Difference

[During January, State of Formation entered into a collaboration with The Interfaith Observer to address the subject of meaning making. Eight contributors from various faith and ethical traditions were asked to describe what makes meaning within their practices and/or tradition.]

I agree with the overall gist of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) in the fact that we all desire, will, and create meaning in our own ways.  I consider meaning-making a phenomenon firmly rooted in subjective human experience.  But what exactly do we mean by “meaning?”  Often times I find that two different ways of understanding “meaning” get conflated.  There is “Meaning” with a capital “M,” which commonly refers to an overall purpose for existence.  Cosmologies, myths, meta-narratives, and teleology are examples of this kind of Meaning.  When people ask deep questions about life, existence, and purpose they are usually referring to this kind of Meaning.  There is another understanding of meaning, namely, “meaning” with a lower case “m.”  This kind of meaning is found throughout the inner world human consciousness experiences.  It is subjective, localized, and particular.  I can find sports “meaningful” without thinking sports have an objective Meaning.  As somebody who does not believe in Meaning, I nonetheless experience meaning all of the time.  I find my family, friends, and hobbies meaningful.  But if you ask me if the universe has Meaning, I will answer in the negative.  I actually find that most responses to “is there Meaning?” end up being as simplistic and absurd as the supercomputer of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy answering “42.”

Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”  With Sartre, I do not believe there is a grand purpose, design, or “point” to the universe.  The interesting thing is that this does not make me a nihilist, a pessimist, or morally abject.  Even though we are spinning on a “pale blue dot” in an expanse of celestial bodies, we can still find meaning in a Meaningless universe.  Life on this dot is an adventure full of diverse and robust experiences.  We can, with Albert Camus, “imagine Sisyphus happy.”  I like to think that for atheists, unbelievers, and certain existentialists, lower-case meaning becomes upper-case Meaning.  I think this is a good thing because it places the focus on this world as the only locus for change and action.  In this worldview we can only act as if this life is all we have.  When meaning becomes Meaning, we also have great reasons for treating each other better.  Anaïs Nin sums up my distinction between Meaning and meaning when she said, “There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”