An Existential Inquiry: Kierkegaard’s Quest for Meaning

by John Hansen *

Søren Kierkegaard is often thought of as the originator of existentialism – which is the notion that individuals can shape their own significance, objectives, and aspirations by using their freedom. We here explore, through Kierkegaard’s thought, existentialism’s unique way of creating meaning. 

Existentialism is distinguished from other systems of thought in various ways.

• While philosophies championing freedom, such as political liberalism, individual autonomy, and rejection of determinism share many similarities with existentialist thinking, existentialist philosophy commonly explores themes of attendant anguish, apprehension, or disquiet. In its emphasis on total freedom, existentialism differs from philosophies that promote freedom yet fail to examine its existential implications fully.

• While existentialism often speaks of an absurd or chaotic world, it tends to resist nihilism and despair. Rather, it highlights the significance of persevering and taking accountability to transcend the lack of meaning in existence without falling into hopelessness. It centres on the belief that there is always purpose in life, and seeks freedom from life’s absurdities when it meets meaninglessness.

• While existentialists accept that freedom of choice is associated with anxiety and ambiguity – existential anguish often being accentuated as an integral part of human life – they acknowledge that it also allows people to choose their own values and goals. In the view of existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, all individuals are ultimately responsible for their actions and decisions.

• While existentialist philosophy often portrays the world as uncaring or lacking any predestined intention, those who choose to view their lives as purposeful may question their decisions and goals. In a process of internal reflection, they face their realities and find transcendent wisdom beyond the confines of the finite universe, even though it is often fraught with conflicting forces.

All of these characteristics contribute to a tension, or duality in existentialism – and, as a result, the existentialist must continually strive to reconcile their contradictory existence. On Kierkegaard’s theory, we are constantly in conflict with ourselves and with our societies. Adversity and paradox are inherent to the human condition.

At the same time, opposing aspects of human nature must be reconciled. A major dichotomy which Kierkegaard emphasised was that between the finite and infinite, the transient and the eternal. Based on Kierkegaard's philosophy, disparate forces engage in dialectical interactions. To uncover truth, one must actively grapple with the uncertainties of one’s being.

As a major example, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard depicts Abraham’s unwavering determination to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, as a symbol of the struggle between faith and ethics. Abraham represents both being a father and having unwavering faith in a higher, divine authority at the same time.

As one finds in this pivotal story, Kierkegaard notes that humans try to grasp their existence and find meaning in their lives from their subjective viewpoints – through the exploration of first-person perspectives – among them ethics, principles, and liberties. A key feature of his writing is the importance which he places on the individual’s experience, authenticity, and engagement with existential issues.

The attention Kierkegaard places on the inner life of the individual contrasts with the widespread sentiments of hollowness and anguish in society today. Thus, Kierkegaard’s ideas still matter today – as is witnessed, for example, by a series of articles published in The Guardian in 2010, by Clare Carlisle – one such being titled, “Kierkegaard and the Pursuit of Meaning.” Duality entails an existential conflict that must be accepted for one to discover oneself.

Kierkegaard's systematic questions enable us to discover conflicting forces and go beyond the finite world in a way that cannot be achieved otherwise. His discussion of duality illuminates the fundamental inconsistencies of human nature. The process of existential inquiry evolves from being a purely philosophical journey to being one of faith and uncertainty as a result of introspection.

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* John Hansen received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in English literature from Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Philosophical Investigations, Philological Review, The Summerset Review, One Sentence Poems, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Litro Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, The Banyan Review, Drunk Monkeys, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. He has presented on a variety of topics at The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC—Regional), The American Comparative Literature Association, The Midwest Conference on British Studies, and others. He is an English Department faculty member at Mohave Community College in Arizona. Read more at johnphansen.com.

Search for Meaning

by Youngjin Kang *

"What is the meaning of life?"

This is probably one of the most fundamental questions pertaining to the well-being of mankind. And many of us frequently ask it to ourselves, either consciously or subconsciously, for the sake of avoiding the eternal hellhole of existential crisis.

Yet, finding an answer to such a question requires us to clarify the implication of the word "meaning" in the first place. What does "meaning" really mean, anyways? There could be a wide spectrum of interpretations for sure, but the most obvious one is to regard the word "meaning" as a synonym of "purpose" in the context of biology.

We, as living things, constantly strive to survive and reproduce because it is what biological entities are predisposed to do. This is instinctual, and conscious effort is needed to suppress such a tendency. Since it is the apparent reality of things around us, it is by no means absurd to claim that the meaning of life is to survive and reproduce, and nothing more.

This, of course, feels a bit too shallow and incomplete. As long as we are intellectually flexible enough to let some philosophy dwell in our faculty of metaphysical delight, we retain our desire to muse upon the meaning of not just our biological bodies, but also the universe as a whole. Such an idea, however, does not provide us with a clear guideline for our thought process because it is mostly hypothetical.

The meaning of the world around us, in its entirety, is a rather vague concept to grasp because the very definition of the word "meaning" does not reside in such an abstract context. When people say that something is "meaningful", they typically mean that it is likely to bring some personal advantage to themselves, such as more money, improved health, better relationship, and the like. They might insist that it is supposed to benefit the whole of humanity and not just themselves, yet this is just the same secular notion being applied to a wider scale (i.e. Beneficial to a large number of people instead of just a few). If we are to discuss the meaning of the universe as a whole, outside of even the scope of humanity itself, it is necessary to admit that such a construct is more of a word play than something inducible from our experience.

If we wish to identify the meaning of life from a pragmatic standpoint, therefore, we must avoid groundless speculations and simply begin by investigating what we are supposed to be doing as biological entities. Only after we succeed in making sense of this, we will be able to expand our domain of reason further and manage to define the word "meaning" in a broader context.

The most primary goal we all share as human beings is to survive. As far as our practical definition of causality goes, all other goals are subsidiary to this root goal. For example, we search for food because the act of eating increases our chance of survival, and we seek shelter because the act of staying in a secure area increases our chance of survival. "Search for food" and "Seek shelter" are both goals, yet they are nothing more than subgoals which are aimed to serve their parent goal (i.e. "Survive").

Let us just suppose for now that our purpose is to live as happily as possible. This makes sense, doesn't it? We all want to be happy, and do not want to be miserable. We all want to survive, live, and prosper. This presupposition of value is unquestionable, as long as we do not venture to hypothesize with the very meaning of our existence itself.

The real problem arises, though, when we try to find out a rather specific way to achieve such a goal. There are countless alternative choices of action which may or may not work, depending on who we are. And since every one of us is a unique individual, a method which works for some of us may not work for others. We all have our own ways of living a happy life because we have different talents, preferences, personalities, physical traits, living standards, etc.

So, how to figure out the best way to live? This is probably the most baffling question you can ever ask to yourself, since you are the only one who can figure it out. You are the one who knows about you thoroughly, and thus nobody but yourself can come up with an accurate answer. And its main difficulty lies on the fact that you alone is the only subject you can observe and analyze when it comes to drawing an empirically sound conclusion.

This is indeed frustrating. If you do not know what to do with your life, you won't be able to motivate yourself to do anything in particular. And as long as this state of uncertainty continues, you will always be anxious and depressed.

Fortunately, there is a way to cure at least a significant portion of this problem. Although every one of us is a unique soul and thus requires a unique approach to life, we all share a set of traits which are common to all human beings.

For example, we all know that eating healthy meals, exercising daily, preferring love over hatred, being honest, and being diligent are good for us. These habits are so universally applicable, that one does not even need to question their effectiveness. The key lies on noticing these "common disciplines" and integrating them into your daily routine.

Take the habit of exercise, for instance. No matter what your profession is and what your personal predilections are, it is almost absolutely certain that doing SOME workout on a regular basis will benefit you in some way or another (unless you are suffering from a rare genetic disease, such as one which makes your muscles emit toxic chemicals whenever you use them). This means that, even if you are totally unsure of what you should be doing with your life, you can still be sure of the fact that you should be working out in order to stay fit. The benefit of this habit will not diminish no matter what path your life will happen to follow in the future.

This is the main takeaway of the analysis made so far. If you don't know what to do, at least do something that is worth doing regardless of your future choices. This behavioral guideline will give you a safety net to which you can always fall back whenever circumstances prevent you from making detailed decisions.

Here is the rule of thumb. Focus on doing something which you can manage to do on a regular basis without relying on external factors (e.g. your wealth, your job, place you live, relationships, etc). This will provide you with a "baseline layer of sanity" upon which you can keep moving forward with your life without having to constantly worry about the meaning of what you are doing. This will be the fountain of purpose from which you can drink an endless stream of hope.

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* Youngjin Kang is a software engineer who develops computer games, simulations, and other forms of interactive media.

Do We Have Free Will?

by Jeremy Dyer *

Seneccio, by Paul Klee, 1922

The psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl wrote: ‘Psychoanalysis unmasks neurosis, and behaviourism demythologizes neurosis.’ This article was inspired by his thoughts in his 1978 book, The Unheard Cry for Meaning.

Psychological therapy—the classic ‘talking cure’—assumes the mechanics of unconscious motivation: childhood trauma and conditioning, subconscious conflicts and neuroses. These mechanics simply have to be unpacked, understood and exposed for an automatic cure. And in many cases, this works.

Behavioural therapy—classic ‘fake it till you make it’—assumes that functional behavior can overrule internal ills. Thus exercising at the gym cures depression. And in many cases, this also works! Additionally, it reveals that much uncovering ‘subconscious motivation’ is merely a waste of time.

Thus a blend—enter Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)—is ideal, right?

Wrong.

Both views, psychoanalytic and behavioural, are reductionist. They assume that we are a type of machine that can be broken down into parts, understood, and then rebuilt in a better way. Not all problems are due to childhood trauma, nor is behaviour modification the solution to all ills. We are far more than a complex machine, much more than advanced rats.

Both of the above, depersonalising, reductionist views of the individual—‘imprintings’ in the mindware—have logical solutions. Any particular lens of diagnosis implies the cure from that viewpoint.

But people are not entirely the slave of their history and upbringing - they can think and act for themselves, against the flow if they so decide. In defying our ‘programming’, in fact, we become uniquely alive. We are not all sheeple; predictable and controllable, like good soldiers and office workers.

No. The history of the world consists of the outliers, those who have broken the mould. Thrown off the conditioning, and rebelled. All progress depends on the ‘unreasonable man’, the playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw famously said; the one who breaks the mould, comes up with their own original ideas like Spartacus, Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Mao Zedung, Rosa Parks, Salvador Dali—people who think and act for themselves. History records many, hero and villain alike.

Viktor Frankl held that the true purpose of psychological intervention is to create a new meaning of life. What he decidedly means is the process of examining the meaning of one’s life and, intrinsically, how to come to terms with one’s difficulties. This method is not limited to a certified expert, but can be anyone or anything which truly inspires and motivates one, be it spiritually or financially. Change is the goal, to move past ‘stuckness’.

Frankl wrote, “Many people in good jobs are successful but want to kill themselves.” One university survey of students who had attempted suicide and also ‘found life meaningless’ revealed that the majority of these students were engaged socially, performing well academically, and on good terms with their family.

The desire for meaning, the awareness of the pain of living, is not a psychological dysfunction but a part of who we fundamentally are. In other words, to feel despair is entirely rational. It is the painful personal condition itself that we must engage, to become our authentic, unique self. The only solution to the experienced horror of a meaningless life is to try to make sense of it with full engagement. The exact same process that is force-fed the addict in rehab. Confronting the horror of ones existence.

We have ‘agency’ and volition, self-observation, meta-cognition, the will to act… Will to meaning is the universal, teleological survival-drive that is built into us all. If this dies, we die.

Everyone is bored with the media-driven, ideological clones. Be who you are, become more who you truly are: fascinatingly unique.



* Jeremy Dyer is a psychologist and artist.

Resist or Die

An implicit celebration of nihilism turns into

satire or pop culture. The seriousness of it all is minimised.

Posted by Jeremy Dyer

We have all become more aware of how fragile we actually are (mind, body, and spirit), and are all hanging on to the reality that we once knew, though it is slowly dissolving. But the future marches inexorably upon us, clouds of toxic mind-dust choking all hope. Right now we face an unprecedented assault upon body, mind, and spirit, akin only to a World War or widespread plague.

In normal times, society had the bedrock of religion, and a fatalistic stoicism; death was part and parcel of life: people died, but the living moved on. Society ticked along all by itself, and we just went with the flow in a reasonably predictable world. There was the assumption of law and order that did not require our active engagement. There was an education ladder and a job at the end, if you put in the effort. Predictable.

Initially we were confident that this Corona-tsunami would pass. However, as it has stubbornly persisted, a future desert of human and economic devastation is steadily coalescing. According to the UN World Food Programme’s David Beasley, more than a quarter-billion people are now “marching toward the brink of starvation”, in large measure due to the Coronavirus. 400 million full-time jobs have already been lost.

Additionally it is becoming glaringly apparent that “leaders” and “scientists” alike are actually confused and unsure what to do. Like us, they are in fact flying by the seat of their pants. In one of the world's largest cities, New York, wrote Dan Adler of Vanity Fair, “frenzied confusion [is] about par for the course.” It has become obvious that the powers that be are not looking after our interests in the broader macro-economic or philosophic sense ...

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The whole machine of civilisation is choking and stuttering, 

and a group of vultures are profiteering off its suffering.

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In South Africa, where I write, “Rona” has glaringly exposed our elected officials for the worthless thieves that they actually were all long. The Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke, turned up “frightening findings,” and law enforcement agencies are investigating more than R10.5 billion (£500 million, or $700 million) in potentially corrupt Coronavirus spending across South Africa.

“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” (Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999).

The whole machine of civilisation is choking and stuttering, and a group of vultures are profiteering off its suffering. Bolts and cogs are daily falling off the interlocking wheels of our finely-meshed consumer society. Doomscrolling news on our smartphones only intensifies our existential angst.

Is it any surprise people feel the claws of despair in their inner being? No wonder existential anxiety is at an all-time high – the pain of being alive; the pain of accepting that our own fate is horrifyingly, completely up to us. The philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote that it all evokes nausea.

Society offers very little hope, though some rage against this “invisible other” by destroying all symbols of authority and civilisation. But the spectre of a wasteland is not an encouraging future.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919).

In our 21st Century consumer society, we have become accustomed to problems being solved. We have become thin-skinned, forgotten the reality of war, and cannot accept that misfortune is “just life”. We demandingly insist that things get resolved, be it a skin cancer, refuse removal, or a luke-warm latte.

We find cognitive dissonance (stress, conflict) intolerable. So we act out, protest, insist on pills to solve what is essentially a personal, existential issue. We want pharmacy to numb our philosophy. Or money to numb our fear of poverty. Usually both. We feel the pressure of slowly being reduced to animals. Our noble ideals of ourselves as spiritual, caring and helping others, being steadily crushed by the predatory motivation of “every man for himself”.

The future appears “bleak,” as the trendy expression goes, but it is also a bleakness we have created in our own minds. Despair prompts apocalyptic solutions: get solar, prep your bunker and grow your own food; yield all responsibility to a totalitarian state; retreat into a personal haze of addiction and denial; kill yourself.

Realistically though, this is not the end of the world, but just another catastrophe, and a relatively mild one by historical standards. We should most determinedly resist despair.

What else remains but hard, personal moral choices?

Joad’s Concept of Personality

Posted by Richard W. Symonds

There is a small group of significant philosophers who had extraordinary turnarounds. The most famous of these is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote about his magnum opus, ‘The author of the Tractatus was mistaken.’ So, too, A.J. Ayer who, in an interview with the BBC, said of his former philosophy, ‘At the end of it all it was false’. Yet perhaps the most extraordinary turnaround was the enormously popular C.E.M. Joad.

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953) was a university philosopher at Birkbeck College London, who wrote on a wide variety of philosophical subjects, both historical and contemporary. For most of his life he rejected religion—but in the 1940s and early 1950s he first abandoned atheism, then accepted a form of theism, and finally converted to Christianity.

Not until Recovery of Belief, in 1952, did he set out the Christian philosophy in which he had come to believe. This post explores just one aspect of that philosophy, namely his theory of personality and the soul—then briefly, what motivated him philosophically, to make such a radical about-turn. Here is Joad’s later view, in his own words:

‘Having considered and rejected a number of views as to the nature and interpretation of the cosmos, I shall state the one which seems to me to be open to the fewest objections. It is, briefly, what I take to be the traditional Christian view, namely, that the universe is to be conceived as two orders of reality, the natural order, consisting of people and things moving about in space and enduring in time, and a supernatural order neither in space nor in time, which consists of a Creative Person or Trinity of Persons from which the natural order derives its meaning, and in terms of which it receives its explanation.’

In his ‘interpretation of the cosmos’, then, Joad proceeds by seeking to vindicate ‘the traditional division of the human being [as] not twofold into mind and body, but threefold into mind, body and soul.’ The reference seems to be to the view identifiable in late-Scholastic theology, that a human being has an immortal part which can sin, be forgiven, and rise at the Last Judgement (the soul); a thinking part which can understand, affirm, deny, desire, imagine (the mind); and a body which is the agent of the mind and soul.

In fairness, Joad does not claim to demonstrate the validity of the threefold analysis; he claims no more than that ‘if it were true it would cover a number of facts which seem to be inexplicable on any other’. He offers it as what we might term an inference to the best explanation. He found no better way to explain the cosmos as he found it.

The soul, Joad tells us, is ‘the essential self and is timeless’. It is incarnated in bodies but can exist without them, since after our bodily death, it remains an individual entity and ‘sustains immortality’. At this point, the influence of Plato’s theory of the soul in the Phaedo is clear. Unplatonic, however, is the notion that the soul is ‘normally inaccessible to us’, and that we at least approximate to an awareness of it in ‘mystical experience’—experience with which ‘most of us, at any rate, are acquainted [in] certain moments of transport of tranquillity that we enjoy in our intercourse with nature’.

Yet Joad’s theory does not rely solely on mystical experience. There are those, he writes, to whom mystical experience is denied. Thus he posits the soul as our ‘point of contact and communication’ with the divine ... God, to use the language of religion, influences man through his soul’.

Joad suggests that ‘The phenomena of spiritual healing and spiritual regeneration are ... most plausibly to be explained on the assumption that God, in response to prayer, acts upon us through the soul to heal the body and strengthen the mind. The soul is also the 'still small voice of God' of which we are conscious when the hubbub of ordinary life and consciousness dies down". This presupposes the existence of God, and of a God who acts in these ways.

Of the mind, Joad tells us that it ‘is brought into being in consequence of the contact of the soul with the natural, temporal order, which results from its incorporation in a physical body’. The mind cannot be identified with matter, as Locke’s ‘thinking substance’, for instance. Mind ‘cannot be adequately conceived in material terms ... Is the notion of conscious matter really thinkable?’ Joad asks rhetorically and in protest against Julian Huxley.

Yet Joad concedes that ‘The mind is, it is clear, constantly interacting with the body and the brain.’ Again, it is not Joad’s purpose to demonstrate the validity of his analysis. In fact, he states that this is a paradoxical occurrence which ‘is, by us, incomprehensible’. This incomprehensibility, further, he sees as being characteristic of what he calls ‘all the manifestations of the supernatural in the natural order’; the supernatural here being the soul—with the mind and the natural being the brain and the body.

There is, however, a crucial concept which subsumes the categories of body, mind, and soul. This is ‘personality’, which Joad describes as being ‘logically prior’ to the soul, mind, and body as the three elements of our being. He introduces us to this concept by considering the relation of a sonata to its notes, and of nation or society to its members (with a more thorough discussion of mereology).

While Joad does not define logical priority, the basic idea is that the soul (to borrow a phrase from C.D. Broad) is ‘an existent substantive’ which temporarily ‘owns’ or is characterised by the mind, the brain, and the body. Hence any idea that the person is a composite, ‘resulting from the concurrence of a number of parts’ has things the wrong way round. The person, essentially identified with the soul as ‘the seat of personality’, is prior to the ‘parts’—the mind, brain, and body.

It came down to this. C.E.M Joad considered the creeds of a single, materialist, physical order of reality ‘palpably inadequate’, almost meaningless, in explaining the universe and our place within it. ‘Personality’ seemed the only explanation left.

Fifteen years after Joad’s death, the philosophical theologian Francis Schaeffer’s major work, The God Who is There, was published in the USA. Interestingly, Schaeffer there presents ‘personality’ as his core idea. He writes that we have either ‘personality or a devilish din’. Schaeffer had an enormous influence on American society and religion. Among other things. President Ronald Reagan, thirteen years later, ascribed his election victory to Francis Schaeffer.

Joad’s final, almost forgotten book may have been more important than we suppose—but not only for society and religion. The idea of ‘personality’ as being logically prior to all else might become a critical pre-condition for humanity’s survival in the 21st century.

Representing Reality: Magritte on Words and Images

Representing reality*

By Martin Cohen

What is the relationship of words and paintings to mental representations - and 'reality' itself? The surrealist artist, René Magritte, is a philosophical favorite (along with Escher whose line drawings depict impossible staircases and infinite spirals) because so many of his pictures play with philosophical themes. Yet, less well appreciated, is his painting rests on a substantial theoretical base and a consistent personal effort to address the key philosophical question - through art - of the relationship of language, thought and reality.

In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, René Magritte offers 18 sketches, each illustrating a supposed 3-way relationship with words and 'reality. This page explores each image in turn. 


Unlike other artists of the Surrealist school, Magritte's style is highly realistic - but this is only a meant to later undermine the authority and certainty of 'appearance' - of our knowledge of the external world. As Magritte puts it:

"We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." [1]

Les Mots et Les Images

An object is not so attached to its name that one cannot find for it another one which is more suitable [2] The handwritten words 'le canon' is usually just translated as 'the gun' -but could this in itself be a play on the sense of 'the canon', the 'thing setting the standard', especially of beauty?

There are objects which can do without a name.
The French word for the rowing boat is 'canot' - but the play on words...?

A word sometimes serves only to designate itself.
'Ciel' is sky... but?

An object encounters its image, and objects encounters its name. It happens that the image and the name of this object encounter each other.
As opposed to the later cases,

Sometimes the name of an object occupies the place of an image.
A hand, a box and a rock?

A word can take the place of an object in reality.
The dame is saying 'sunshine'. Or 'the sun' if you like. Does it link to the next image?

An image can take the place of a word in a sentence. [3]
Well, yes, but logically the sun should be hidden, no?

An object can suggest that there are other objects behind it.
The wall does not make me think there is anything behind it. The sun? The dame?

Everything tends to make us think that there is little relationship between an object and that which represents it.  [4] Confusingly, the 'real' and the 'image' are of course the same here...

The words which serve to indicate two different objects do not show what may divide these objects from one another. The 'surreal' labelling in French translates as 'person with memory loss' and 'woman's body'.

In a painting the words are of the same substance as the images.
But are they?

You can perceive words and images differently in a painting.
Is Magritte saying a new meaning can be created by juxtapositions like this?

A shape can replace the image of an object for any reson.
A very confusing play on shapes here...

An object never serves the same purpose as either its name or its image does.
The man is calling his horse - or is he calling his horse 'horse'?

Sometimes the visible shapes of objects, in real life, form a mosaic
René seems to have drifted somewhat from his original theme here...

Vague or unclear shapes have a precise significance every bit as necessary as that of perfect shapes.
Again, the example has left language slightly out of the debate. But the point could be extended...

Sometimes, the names written in a picture designate precise things, while the images are vague.
Well... yes...

Or equally, the opposite:
But is the word 'fog' (brouillard) itself imprecise?

Decoding Magritte

The images above all appeared in an article by Magritte entitled, rather literally, 'Les mots et les images' (Words and Images), in La Révolution surréaliste in December 1927. The series is intended to introduce the theme of all Magritte's painting, namely that of the ambiguity of the connections between real objects, their image and their name. The fifth statement here: "sometimes the name of an object stands for an image" he went on to illustrate with this image:

This is one of a series of 'alphabet paintings' or 'word paintings' produced by Magritte during his time in Paris from 1927 to 1930. Here, the words 'foliage', 'horse', 'mirror', 'convoy', written on the canvas, replace the image they designate. 'Placed at the tip of the points of a mysterious star and each inscribed on a brown stain, "any form whatsoever that can replace the image of an object", these words play a full part in the spatial composition of a new fantasy image. This painting undoes the connection that we spontaneously establish between objects, images and words.' [5]

Another clue as to Magritte's philosophy is provided by a series of paintings dealing with the concept of 'categories'. In The Palace of Curtains (1929) two frames contain respectively the word ciel ('sky') and a pictorial representation of a blue 'sky'. Magritte's point is that both the word and image 'represent' the 'real thing' - one works by resemblance while the other is only by an intellectual - arbitary - association.

Les Mots et Les Images

In two pictures called Empty Mask (a 'mask' being a 'frame', here) Magritte again makes a point about what 'represents' what. In the first picture the frame is empty by virtue of nothing being painted in the spaces, but equally in the second frame, full of characteristic Magritte images, the frame is still empty because these fragments do not represent anything. Or so at least art historians theorise. [6]

'The dividedness, the fragmented quality and the separateness of their components deprive them of anything that resembles reality, destroys all narrative content' (says one, Bart Ottinger).

Another image, The Threshold of Liberty (1929), adds a gun, threatening in surrealist fashion to destroy the conventional representations.

In the Key to Dreams series, which this page starts with an image of, Magritte uses images in the style of a schoolroom reading text, probably based on the Petit Larousse, texts in which an obvious and exact correspondence is implied. Thus his simple images pack a subversive message.

It is, as one art critic says, a school reading primer gone wrong - yet sometimes, not completely wrong, for example in the image opposite (Key to Dreams,1930) the lower right-hand cell is correct.

In the six panel image above, none of the nouns (the acacia, moon, snow, ceiling, storm, desert) match up.

The title, 'Key to Dreams' (La clef des songes) however implies that there may be deeper, hidden connections.

So are we any nearer to decoding that meaning? Not really. However, Michel Foucault knew Magritte and discussed these ideas in an essay 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' (This is not a Pipe). Foucault has some definite suggestions on the matter.

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*This essay originally appeared on the now disappeared Pi Alpha. It has been slightly updated here.

Notes

• 1 This much quoted line comes from a lecture Magritte gave, entitled, 'La Ligne de vie' - how should we translate that though?
• 2 The first 12 translations are based on that at http://www.kraskland.com/
• 3 This is NOT the translation at http://www.kraskland.com/ - which uses 'propositon' - ridiculous!
• 4 This is slightly better than the translation at http://www.kraskland.com/
• 5 As explained here: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-surrealistart-EN/ENS-surrealistart-EN.htm
• 6 For example, this interestingand informative essay here: http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/book/wordsinimages/magritte.html

The Misconstruction of Construction

Posted by Christian Sötemann

More than one philosophical theory has been suggested as a way to construe the world primarily as a construction accomplished by human mental faculties – rather than as mere passive depiction of the objective state of the world. 

Such approaches (most overtly in what is called ‘constructivism’) suggest that what we seem to perceive as characteristics of the external world are essentially the results of a hidden process of internal construction. It seems to me that there are at least two possible misunderstandings of this particular mindset: firstly, that the mental construction process occurred out of thin air, and secondly, that in a constructed world, there are no criteria to distinguish fact from fiction.

To maintain that there can be only mental construction and nothing else would seem to imply human beings construct the experienced world from scratch. However, this quickly turns out to be a far from unassailable view. For a start, it appears to be impossible to construct a world of experience out of nothing at all. A putative building block devoid of any characteristics, of any potential or impact whatsoever is an empty conception and cannot lead to the emergence of something that exhibits certain qualities.

Elements of construction that are nothing are no elements of construction. If you combine nothing with nothing you will still end up with nothing.

There has to be something that can be processed and modified, some material that is used for the construction process; though this is not sufficient evidence for the existence of matter itself, which cannot automatically be extrapolated from the necessity of the existence of some sort of material for the process of mental construction.

What is more is that the process of construction is something in itself. An event has to occur in some way so that construction can take place. The something that provides the material for construction and the something that induces the construction process cannot emerge out of that very process they are supposed to enable in the first place. Therefore it is – by way of a placeholder – ‘a something’ that must be considered beyond construction.

Similarly, it always seems to be necessary to add ‘a somebody’ - some sort of person or centre of mental activity - to accomplish the construction, since without such a carrier, there could not be any cohesive mental process. If single acts of mental construction occurred incoherently here and there, it would merely mean occasional mental flickering and not have the connectedness that an experienced world evidently has, with its continuity in space and time. This does, on the other hand, not necessarily suggest the notion of a corporeal human being as carrier of mental construction: even our perceived body might dogmatically be regarded as a construct of experience and cognition itself.

Moving over to the second possible misunderstanding, just because the experienced world can be conceived as largely a result of construction processes of the mind, it does not mean that there were no difference between mere opinion and well-researched facts and were I to claim that I was able to construct the world in any way I want it to be would be to run the risk of self-delusion.

So what do constructivist authors (such as the American professor Ernst von Glasersfeld) suggest as means of differentiation instead? Put bluntly: some things work, others do not. I experience obstacles that point out to me that certain attempts to construct and construe a reality do not work. Consider these simple examples from the world of concrete objects, like that evergreen case of the table, beloved for philosophers from Plato to Bertrand Russell: 

Imagine a person from a culture that does not utilise tables at all. Exposed to a table standing in a garden, this person might conclude that this unknown object is a device to provide shelter from the rain. Is this viable? It surely is: I can sit down under the table in case of rain and hence be kept from getting wet. This may not be the original intention of our table-utilising culture, but it can be done that way. What cannot be done, for instance, is that I regard the table standing in the garden as some projected image that I can simply walk through if so inclined. I experience that this does not work. I will find that the table standing there hinders me from just walking through it.

Similarly, a plate could be used as a paperweight, a shield, or a percussive instrument, but not a beverage or a pen: I cannot make it a liquid for me to drink or have it emit ink. So, from a mindset that emphasises the aspect of mental construction, several alternatives are found to be viable – even if possibly inconvenient and not the best of alternatives – but others are not viable at all. There is a limit to the alternative usages and interpretations available. I may not be able to know the outside world beyond my experience, but in that very experience I can find out what this outside world allows me not to do. This acknowledgement of obstacles necessarily means that I have to relinquish the idea of living in a world I can equip in any way I want to.

There are plenty of utterly legitimate criticisms concerning philosophical stances emphasising construction (and not only constructivism itself), but the more useful step is to undertake a clarification of some of the typical misunderstandings. This can transform disagreement resting on disbelief and gut feelings into informed criticism.

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Christian H. Sötemann has degrees in psychology and philosophy, and works in psychological counselling and as a lecturer in Berlin, Germany. He can be contacted via: chsoetemann@googlemail.com

Death and History

Posted by Király István

Death lays the foundations of human history. However, this is only one aspect of death.

Death does not only illuminate the historically articulated human life, so to speak 'externally' — or more precisely, from its end, from an indefinite and aleatory, 'retrospective' point of view, as a foreign and external element — but it continuously interweaves, and what is more, grounds it in its most essential aspects.

To such an extent that history probably exists precisely because there is mortal human life — which is to say, a mortal human being who relates by his life to death, to his being-like-death and mortality — also in a being-like way, and mode of being-like. In other words because there is such a life to which death — its own death — in all respects lends weight, challenge, pressure — grip! — over itself and for itself, and by this a continuous and unavoidable possibility to undertake.

So, the non-human, non-Dasein*-like life which is 'finite', and as such is always born, disappears, passes away, comes into being, extinguishes, changes and evolves ... well, this life actually does not, and cannot have a history — just as the 'inorganic' regions of being have no history in fact, only in a metaphoric sense. Which of course does not mean that this life is not in motion, in change — that it is unrelated with time, or does not 'possess' time with all the processes and 'events', necessary or incidental — in the sense of their happening and references. These of course are also in touch with human history as challenges, meanings and possibilities — which is, when and if there is a questionable meaning or a question referring to meaning. So they have a story, but do not have a history — to the extent that this story of beings devoid of history only becomes — or only can become! — a history of being by history.

In accordance with this reasoning, history exists in fact because there is human death, because there are beings who relate to death — explicitly or implicitly — in and with their being, in and with their mode of being, in a being-like way — for whom death, their own death is not a mere givenness, but — by the way they relate to it — is, in fact, a possibility.

Moreover, it is a possibility which, by its own 'substantive' happening, is dying — precisely by its dying but always beyond it. It is a possibility which derives — and constitutes and structures, articulates, permeates, colours — all of their other modes and possibilities of being. In other words, it opens them up really and truly, structures them open in — and precisely because of — its finitude. And by this, it also lends to these possibilities a well-defined importance, open towards, and from, this finitude, which also leads in fact to the articulation of these modes of being.

If the various modes and regions of human existence — as well as their birth and changes in time — can prove that their very existence, meaning and change is utterly unthinkable and 'absurd' without death, or that death plays a direct or indirect role in their coming into being or changes, then it is also proved that death grounds, originates, and constitutes history in the … essential, ontological sense.


*Dasein is a German word which literally means 'being there' or 'presence'.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for the purposes of the blog,  from his new book, Death and History.

Poem: Friendship

Posted by Theo Olivet *

Original painting by T.A. Marrison

A central question of life is that of where may I find firm ground as I search for my own position? Subsidiary ones are: Does friendship help? Is it possible to obtain support through common suffering? Or to define one's future position? And to what extent may one find strength through the weaknesses of others? 

Friendship
Translated from the original German by Pi Editors

Come, let the two of us bow down
at this, our so familiar place,
so many stubs you stubbed out here,
the white smoke rising from your face.

And then, in that deep silence
to which we often yielded,
A raw cough I coughed
and my eyes from yours I shielded.

At times a gentle word fell,
'I run from me, tomorrow.'
And you in turn, said frankly:
'My man has not been found, though,
I guess I am my own first foe ...'
I asked:  'You mean, above, below?'
Then we wept aloud.

Those were the days! I tell myself.
So awesome! they won't come again,
yet we stood there, all four feet
in a sea of tar then …

Come, give me one of yours
since mine are dull in taste,
I am changing, it would seem to me,
this house has all but gone to waste,
my doors are much a'rattling,
oh, were my sails by new wind chased.

The cigarette, yeah …  I say thank you,
the way it tastes, the smoke reminds me
how oft you fingered stubs and drew.
You … yes you … I wish once more to be
with you

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* Theo Olivet is an author, artist, and retired judge in Schleswig-Holstein
The original German language poem appears at Gedicht: Freundschaft

Picture Post No. 8: Apples COMMENT ADDED

This is definitely not a Picture Post, Thomas. I think you have to reformati it. It is a bit more of your theory of how language works, so I guess should be 'potentailly' a post. But even as that it does seem rather trivial. You would need I think to redynamise this one - more examples maybe?

Martin

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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NOTE:  I have put a preferred version of this post at the top, yet have left the previous versions intact (below), to give priority to the editorial eye. Thomas.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One sees, above, the results of two Google Image searches. First, I searched for 'apples'.  Then, I searched for 'pommes'.  Then I jumbled them up.  Pommes, of course, are apples in French.  Do not scroll down. 

The 'apples' (English) have an ideal form.  Several shift even into abstraction or stylization.  They only occur singly, and most of them sport only one leaf.  They are red, and only red, and are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut: not to eat, but to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  The 'pommes' (French) belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, even yellow.  One may take a bite out of them to taste, or cut them through or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or to drop them into a pot.  Pommes, too, are always real, unless one should draw one for a child.

Now separate out the apples from the pommes. Scroll down. You probably distinguished most apples from pommes. In so doing, you acknowledged – if just for a moment – that in some important way, apples are not pommes.

(While this example is flawed, try the same with more
distant languages, and more complex words).

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One sees, above, the results of two Google Image searches. First, I searched for 'apples'.  Then, I searched for 'pommes'.  Then I jumbled them up.  Pommes, of course, are apples in French.  Do not scroll down. 

'Apples' have an ideal form.  So much so, in fact, that they tend to shift into abstraction or stylization.  Mostly (though not in every case), they sport only one leaf.  Apples only occur singly.  They are red, and only red, and they are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut, though not to eat it – rather to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  'Pommes', on the other hand, belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, yellow, even plum.  And leaves: they may have one, or two, or none.  One may take a bite out of them to taste.  One may cut them through, or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or perhaps to drop them in a pot. And pommes are always real, unless one should draw one for a child.

Now separate out the apples from the pommes. Scroll down. You probably accomplished this with 80% accuracy. In so doing, you acknowledged – if just for a moment – that in some important way, apples are not pommes.

(Now try the same with more distant languages, and more complex words).

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Two Google Image searches.  First, 'apples'.  Then, 'pommes'. (A pomme, of course, is an apple in French). 

The 'apples' (English) have an ideal form.  Several shift even into abstraction or stylization.  They sport one leaf (with two exceptions).  They only occur singly.  They are red, and only red, and are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut: not to eat, but to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  The 'pommes' (French) belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, yellow, even plum.  One may take a bite out of them to taste, or cut them through or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or to drop them into a pot.  Pommes, too, are always real, unless one should draw a picture for a child.

Signifier points to signified, we are told, whether 'apple' or 'pomme'. But in English and in French, are the signifieds the same?

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Meaning is More

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The title of one of Thomas Nagel's popular books reads at first sight like a question to be answered: 'What Does It All Mean?' But the word 'All' has undertones of something more perverse. I wrote to Professor Nagel that, as one turns the pages, the meaning of the title seems to turn into to a cry of despair. Yes, he replied, I had recognised the double entendre.

For many people, a lack of meaning is no slight problem. Some experience it as a living death, while others would rather die than surrender their meaning. At the same time, there has been a curious retreat of meaning in our day. It now lies beyond the interest of many people – even, sometimes, beyond the interest of dictionaries of philosophy. Historically, however, it has been an important philosophical question.



What is meaning? There are many kinds of meaning: existential meaning, psychological meaning, linguistic meaning, semiotic meaning, and various meanings besides. There is, too, a classic book on the subject: The Meaning of Meaning. The professor of philosophy Gilbert Harman notes that, in the theory of language, meaning can mean three things: the place which an expression has in the language, the thought which it communicates, and that for which it is used.

One may say much the same about the meaning of life. One's meaning is about finding one's place in the universe, bringing one's own self to full expression, and achieving one's goals and purpose. All three, in fact, are aspects of one and the same: I experience meaning when I know and feel my place in the big, wide whole – in the context of everything. Aristotle noted, 'Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life – the whole aim and end of human existence.' We may note his emphasis on 'the whole'. The meaning of life is not partial. Rather, it encompasses everything.

What, then, is 'the whole' of it? It has been the tragic tale of countless people, that they held a meaning which was later exposed as being only partial – in fact, was found to hold no real meaning at all. They found their meaning in a cause which was destroyed, in a relationship which ended, even in things which later proved to be ruinous.

Some philosophers suggest that there may be no real problem with that. The professor of philosophy Thomas Nagel writes, 'Perhaps the trick is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.' The fleeting meanings of the moment are all that we need – we just shouldn't think on it too hard. This may seem to have some appeal, except for two reasons: we sense that meaning is not something we should ever lose – it ought to be timeless, absolute, not a victim of the vagaries of life. But more than this, if meaning is partial or fleeting, we may bring others into bondage to our own petty meanings (of which more in a moment).

MEANING IS MORE

Meaning may be found in many things: in a lover, a family, an ambition, a culture. Various ideas, too, may play a focal role in our lives: economics, social evolution, science, or politics. And this gives us a clue as to what we do when we find a meaning. We find it within the systems we create. Consider for a moment that this universe is, in the words of the Buddhist expositor Lama Govinda, an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations'. It is, in a sense, beyond all systems – so our systems of meaning may be understood to be 'regions of relations' within this infinite expanse.

But now, a problem arises. If we step outside of our 'regions of relations', our meanings will evaporate. There is no meaning outside the system. All is well while I measure my meaning, say, by the well-being of the roses in my garden. Yet if I step outside of this, to ask what life is about beyond it, I find no answer. Until, that is, I find a new and a bigger answer.

It is a fundamental feature of meaning, then, that it always requires something more. It always requires something which lies outside of my given system of meaning. Every closed system can be imagined to be larger. The entrepreneur Adam Toren gives us this timely reminder about meaning: 'It is bigger than this!'

Seen like this, we may call our quest for meaning an infinite progression. It must be more, and more, and more. And as the horizons of our systems of meaning expand, so we come to realise that, ultimately, meaning must be unbounded. Ultimately, meaning is found in the 'infinite expanse' – without those constructions which confine it and reduce it to mere 'regions of relations'. Ultimate meaning only reveals itself to me where systems of meaning are destroyed. Meaning is found, in an important sense, only where the quest for meaning is abandoned – or perhaps one should say, fulfilled.

This, presumably, is why the 'larger' meanings of our world have such an allure: they incorporate our smaller meanings, which fail to answer our search for 'more'. Larger meanings are systems which lie outside of the confines of our own muddling purposes. This is why a Napoleon, or a Hitler, or a Stalin can exist. They offer a meaning which is more.

Or a God. However, God may be understood not only as the guarantor of my own system of meaning – 'God told me to do it,' or 'I was obeying God' – but God may be seen as the purpose beyond all purposes, before whom all contrived meanings dissolve. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote, 'God is being-itself, not a being.' God is not entangled with our own small designs.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

Destiny, culture, ideology are schemes of meaning so large that one can barely imagine anything larger, that might lie outside of them or beyond them. Not even famine or war or genocide may defeat such systems, so large may they become. This presents us with a sobering thought on the 'more' of meaning. If our meaning is not to be found in the whole of the infinite expanse of relations, or in something which transcends our meaning, our meaning may well lead to disaster.

There are other dangers which lie in a loss of a larger meaning. More than anything, my own loss of meaning may reduce the meaning of others. One is able to view others only in terms of the meaning – the 'regions of relations' – which one has traced for oneself in this world. This means that everything, and everyone, must be understood in terms of my own meaning.

When a woman becomes a student of sociology, she may comment at a cocktail party, 'Sociology explains all that.' When a businessman owns a nature reserve (and remains a businessman at heart), he will run his nature reserve as a business. If an economist becomes a president (and remains an economist at heart), he will treat the nation as an economy. One president said that untimely deaths were bad for the economy.* The earth quakes, wrote King Solomon, when a slave becomes king – presumably because the slave sees the world in terms of the master-slave relationship, and cannot see its meaning beyond such terms.

The flight of 'meaning' today, from our social and philosophical debate, has much to do with the fragmentation of our society. As we have developed a complex social diversity, so we have lost touch both with our world as a whole, and with one another's worlds. Increasingly, we have needed to focus on smaller meanings. And all too often, when these smaller meanings dissolve, we seek to preserve them and protect them. And if they should represent my total system which I cannot see beyond, I may choose any means to keep them: petty fraud, white lies, implied threats, even worlds of fancy in my mind which do not exist. But the world is bigger and more beautiful than that. In the words of Graham Ward, professor of divinity at Oxford:

The system is a self-contained whole within which everything is made meaningful.

*President Thabo Mbeki, who was trained as an economist.