For my own thinking one important by-product of the foregoing considerations has been the illumination of the concept of "meaning". In general we - the intellectuals, the philosophers, the scientists - have meant by it that it integrates, coordinates, classifies, and organizes the chaos, the multiple, and the meaningless many. It is a gestalting, holistic activity, the creation of a whole. This whole and its parts then have the meaning that the parts did not hitherto have. "Organizing experience into meaningful patterns" implies that experience itself has no meaningfulness, that the organizer creates or im-poses or donates the meaning, that this giving of meaning is an active process rather than a receptive one, that it is a gift from the knower to the known.
In other words, "meaningfulness" of this kind is of the realm of classification and abstraction rather than of experience. It is an aspect of economical, simpleward knowledge and science rather than of all-descriptive and comprehensive knowledge and science. Frequently I sense also the implication that it is "human-created", i.e., that much of it would vanish if human beings disappeared. And this in turn leads me to align "manmade meaningfulness" with the underlying implication that things (reality, nature, cosmos), having no inherent, intrinsic meaningfulness, must be clothed with meaningfulness, and if man is incapable of doing this, then some god must.
It is possible to counter this ultimately mechanistic world view in two different ways. One is to do as many contemporary artists, composers, screen writers, poets, dramatists, and novelists (and some philosophers, too) have done, and that is to embrace this notion overenthusiastically after being repelled and depressed by it, and to talk about the ultimate absurdity and meaninglessness of life, to paint, write, or compose by chance, to break up meaningfulness as if it could be only clich?, to talk of "indeterminacy and the arbitrariness of any human decision", etc. [9-1] For them meaningfulness is ultimately by fiat and is an arbitrary decision that emerges from no principle, from no requirements, and that is an unpredictable and occasionalistic act of will. Life becomes a series of "happenings", meaningless in itself and without intrinsic values. Such a person can easily become the total skeptic, nihilistic, relativistic, impulsive, without any right or wrong or better or worse. In a word, he becomes a person without values. If the juices of life do not flow strongly within his veins, he will wind up talking about despair, anguish, and suicide. This is as if to say, "O. K.! I must accept it. Life has no meaning. I must rely entirely on my own arbitrary decisions. I mustn't believe anything or believei n anything other than these blind wishes, whims, and impulses for which there is no possible justification outside of their own felt pushiness". Of course this is the most extreme version that I have seen of this attitude, but it is a logical consequence of it.
But this development can be seen in another way altogether, as part of the Zeitgeist , as one aspect of the century-long revolt against the great abstract "systems" of religion, economics, philosophy, politics, and even science, which had become so distant from real human needs and experiences that they looked like - and often were - vast hypocrisies and rationalizations. It can be seen as an expression of Dostoevsky's and Nietzsche's dictum that "if God is dead, then anything is permissible". It can be seen from another angle as one consequence of the collapse of all the traditional, extrahuman value systems, which left only one place to turn - into the self and back to experience. It is a kind of testimony to our need for meaning and our despair when we think there is none.
In a positive sense we can call it the return to the sheer experience, which is the beginning of all thought and to which we always return when the abstractions and systems fail us. We then realize more fully that the ultimate meaning of many facts is simply the sheer being of their own existence. Throughout human history many who were forced to doubt have tried to become naive again, to go back to the beginnings, to think everything through again on a solider and more certain foundation, to ask in a time of turmoil if there were anything that they could be really sure of. There are times in life when patching up and improving seems like a hopeless task and when it is easier to raze the structure altogether and to build again from the ground up.
If we add to this the common human temptation to dichotomize, to choose one side or the other - and therefore to choose either experiential suchness (renouncing all abstraction as the intrinsic enemy) or abstractness, lawfulness, and integrations (renouncing suchness as the enemy of lawfulness) - then these extreme positions can be seen as the pathological consequences of dichotomizing. They can be seen as foolish and unnecessary, even as consequences of the childish inability to be integrative and inclusive (1,2) or to be synergic (49,51).
As we have already seen, it is easily possible to accept and to enjoy the virtues both of suchness and of abstraction. As a matter of fact, it is even necessary for full sanity and humanness to be comfortable with both. I therefore propose to speak of two different kinds of meanings, which are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I will call the one abstractness meaning and the other suchness meaning, and point out that the one is of the realm of classifications and abstractions and that the other is of the experiential realm. I prefer this usage rather than the equally possible one of saying that the smell of a rose is meaningless or absurd because, for most people, these latter words are still invidious and normative and can therefore lead to pathogenic misunderstandings.
These two kinds of meaningfulness generate two kinds of communication and of expression as well, whether in language, in art, in the cinema, or in poetry. And they even show us again that science has two tasks. One is the full acknowledgment, acceptance, and savoring of concrete, raw experience. The other is the effort to bind these experiences together, to seek out their similarities and differences, to figure out their regularities and their interrelations with each other, to construct them into systems that can be expressed simply and that can thus condense many experiences into a formula (or "law") which comprehends them all and which we can grasp.
But these two tasks or goals are interrelated and cannot be split apart without damage, nor can we choose one to the exclusion of the other, for then we generate a crippled "reduction to the concrete" and a crippled "reduction to the abstract".
These two approaches to meaning further clarify such words as "understanding", "predicting", and "explaining". The purely "scientific" person uses these words - unwittingly - in a way different from the ideally intuitive type. For the former an increase in understanding usually comes from and is equal to a move toward the simple. It is more monistic, closer toward unity, an economical reduction of complexity and of chaos. "Understanding" and "explanation" lie behind the manifold and the multiplex and help to make it comprehensible. It joins, for example, cabbages and kings in some integrating organization, some unifying connection, instead of just leaving them there, ununified, for noninterfering contemplation.
For such a person "explaining" and "understanding" both have a reductive effect, in the sense of reducing the number of variables that must be grasped and also in the sense that the surface appearance of the manifold is less "real" than the simpler explanatory theory that lies behind the world of appearances. It is a kind of rejection of face value, and it is a way of reducing mystery. In the extreme instance, for him, that which cannot be explained cannot be real or true.
But for the more experiential type of person, there is also another kind of understanding that parallels "suchness meanings". Understanding something then is experiencing that something in its own right and in its own nature. This experiencing, for instance, of a person or of a painting, can grow deeper, richer, more complex and yet can remain within the object that one is trying to understand better. And so we can differentiate experiential understanding from the integrative or abstract understanding that is an active move toward simplification, economy and parsimony.
Far from simplifying and condensing the experience and far from moving toward a diagram of it (or an X-ray or a schema or a mathematical description of it), experiential understanding is content to rest there within the experience, not going beyond it, savoring it and getting the taste and smell of it in that direct way. This is the kind of understanding that the sculptor has of clay or stone, that the carpenter has of wood, that a mother has of her baby, that a swimmer has of water, or that a husband and wife have of each other. And this is the kind of understanding that is ultimately impossible for the nonsculptor, the noncarpenter, the nonmother, the nonswimmer, or the nonmarried, no matter what other resources of knowledge may be available.
The word "explanation" as used by scientists normally has only a simpleward meaning. It seems always to point beyond the experience, and to represent a theory about it. But some artists and critics use the word also in an experiential, self-referential way. This has some usefulness, and at the least we ought to be aware of it. This is the sense in which something experienced is its own explanation. What is the meaning of a leaf, a fugue, a sunset, a flower, a person? They "mean" themselves, explain themselves, and prove themselves. Many modern painters or musicians and even poets reject the now old-fashioned demand that works of art "mean" something beyond themselves, that they point outward and have nonself reference, or that they have a message, or that they be "explainable" in the ordinary scientific sense of simplification. They are rather self-contained worlds that are to be looked at rather than through. They are not a step to something else, nor are they stations on the road to some other terminus. They are not signs or symbols standing for something other than themselves. Neither can they be "defined" in the ordinary sense of being placed within a class or in a historical sequence or in some other relationship to the world outside themselves. Most musicians, many painters, and even some poets will refuse even to talk about their works or to "interpret" them beyond labeling them in some purely arbitrary way or merely pointing at them and saying, "Look!" or "Listen!" [9-2]
And yet even in this realm of discourse people do talk of studying a Beethoven quartet (in the experiential sense of immersing oneself in it, of repeated exposure and contemplation, of minute examination of its inner structure under a higher power of the microscope, so to speak, rather than of studying about it). And then they say that they understand it more profoundly. There is a school of literary criticism with similar tenets, whose adherents rely on close examination of the work itself rather than upon its sociological, historical, political, or economic context. These people have not relapsed into the silence that ineffability would seem to call for. They have much to say, and theydo use the words "meaning", "explanation", "understanding", "interpretation", and "communication", although of course still trying to stay strictly within the experience.
In my opinion these positive usages from the world of art are helpful in a reconstructed philosophy of science that includes rather than excludes experiential data. I think they are preferable to the other style of usage that talks of "meaninglessness" and "absurdity" rather than of "suchness meaning", that reduces itself to pointing rather than to verbal communication, that repudiates any effort to explain or to define, and that can only wait for the illumination to happen without being able in any way to help it come, saying, in effect, "If you don't get it, you never will". The positive usage promises, I think, more sophisticated and insightful commerce with experiential data and more pragmatic and fruitful management of them. The words "absurd", "meaningless", "ineffable", and "unexplainable" imply a failure of nerve because they talk of a nothing, a zero, an absence of something rather than a presence that can be dealt with scientifically. The positive usages are also justified by the fact that they imply the acceptance of the possibility that experiences can be end experiences, valid and valuable in themselves. These usages are appropriate to a Psychology of Being, i.e., a psychology that deals with ends and with final states of being. Negative usages imply acceptance of the classical scientific insistence on being value-free and on having nothing to do with ends but only with means to ends (which are somehow arbitrarily given).
Many basic experiences in life, perhaps ultimately all experiences, are "unsolvable". That is to say, they are impossible to understand. You can't make any sense out of them beyond their own is-ness. You can't be rational about them; they just are. About all you can do with them is simply to recognize their existence, to accept them, and, whenever possible, to enjoy them in their richness and mystery, at the same time realizing that they constitute much of the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?". Life is in part its own meaning. That is, the sheer experiencing of living, or walking, of seeing, of tastes and smells, of sensuous and emotional experiences, and all the rest help to make life worthwhile. When they are no longer positively enjoyed, life itself is called into question, and we have the possibility of boredom, ennui, depression and suicide. Then we say, "Life is meaningless", or "What's the sense of living", or "Life is no longer worthwhile". It is for this reason also that I prefer to speak in terms of suchness meaning rather than to concede meaninglessness.
The differentiation of suchness meaning from abstractness meaning, of suchness understanding from abstraction understanding, and of suchness explanation from simpleward explanation has taught me something else as well.
About fifteen years ago I began an investigation into the motivations of characterologically different types of scientists. I asked them simply to ramble on at length in answer to my two questions "Why did you pick your line of work, your field, your problem?" and "What are the main rewards (the gratifications, the pleasure, the kicks, the peak moments of highest happiness) that you get out of your work? What keeps you at it? Why do you love your work?" These two questions parallel the difference between "Why did you fall in love?" and "Why do you stay married?" For various reasons, I had to give up this research after interviewing perhaps a dozen scientists in various fields. But even with these few I became impressed with the variety of covert motives that impelled scientists to their work and kept them at it. As with other human beings, their world view, their pleasures and satisfactions, their likes and dislikes, their vocational choices, and their styles of work were in part an expression of their "characters". I was confronted again, as so many other investigators have been, with the temptation to differentiate the contrasting types that have been called by so many names, tough-minded and tender-minded, Apollonian and Dionysian, anal and oral, obsessional and hysterical, masculine and feminine, controlled and impulsive, dominating and receptive, suspicious and trusting, etc. For a time I used the designations x character and y character, defining these as the common elements in all these pairs of antonyms. At other times I used the words "cool" and "warm" because neither of these is invidious or insulting, and I thought also that the "physiognomic quality" of these words was better than more explicitly defined words in the present state of knowledge. For the same reasons I have also tried the "blue-green" (end of the spectrum) and contrasted it with "red-orange-yellow" people. Finally I put the problem aside, even though the feeling of being on the edge of some vast illumination even yet lingers. The trouble is that it has remained in this same teasing position for fifteen years, without my getting any closer to illumination.
One impression, tentative at the time, has become more convincing over the years, and I offer it here for more careful testing. Those individuals that I thought of as "cool" or "blue-green" or "tough-minded" in character and outlook tended, it seemed to me, to have as the goals of their scientific work the establishment of law, of regularities, of certainty, of exactness. They spoke of "explanation", and by this they clearly implied the tendency toward parsimony, and economy, the simple, the monistic. The moment of reductiveness, i.e., of a reduction in the number of variables, was a moment of triumph and of high achievement. By contrast I felt that the "warm" people, the red-orange-yellow, the intuitive ones (who come closer to the poet-artist-musician than to the engineer-technologist), the "tender-minded" and "soft-nosed" scientists tended to speak glowingly of the moment of "understanding" as the high spot and the reward of investigation, i.e., suchness understanding. In a word, it looks as if the distribution on the characterological continuum from tough-minded to tender-minded may be paralleled by a continuum with "lawful explanation" at one end and "suchness understanding" at the other. [9-3]
This comes close to hypothesizing that "abstract knowledge" and "experiential knowledge" are the contrasting goals (for the pure or extreme types).